Page:The Hunterian oration, delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons in London, on the fourteenth day of February, 1821 (electronic resource) (IA b21483851).pdf/26

18 her from the eyes and admiration of the world, after some continuance, she began to lose the beauty she had. The storms of ambition beat her great boughs and branches one against another; her leaves fell off, her limbs withered, and a rabble of barbarous nations entered the field, and cut her down.”

With the melancholy results of this confusion and overthrow of the fourth great monarchy of the world, we are all well acquainted. For when the Saracens had completed in the eastern part of the empire, that work of desolation which the Goths and Vandals had before effected in the western; and literature and science appeared to have received their mortal blow, by the final destruction of the library �