Chapter 42

It seems to me as though I were finishing a journey in England like that which I made, in earlier days, on the ruins of Athens, of Jerusalem, of Memphis and Carthage. Summoning to my presence the centuries of Albion, passing from renown to renown, seeing them swallowed up by turns, I feel a sort of painful giddiness. What has become of those brilliant and riotous days in which lived Shakespeare and Milton, Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, Cromwell and William[223], Pitt and Burke? All that is finished; superiorities and …