which all European magnificence is confessed to fade away. The ruins of
their architecture are the schools of modern builders, and from the wonders
which time has spared we may conjecture, though uncertainly, what it has
destroyed.« »My curiosity, said Rasselas, does not very strongly lead me to
survey piles of stone, or mounds of earth; my business is with man. I came
hither not to measure fragments of temples, or trace choaked aqueducts, but to
look upon the various scenes of the present world.«
    »The things that are now before us, said the princess, require attention,
and deserve it. What have I to do with the heroes or the monuments of ancient
times? with times which never can return, and heroes, whose form of life was
different from all that the present condition of mankind requires or allows.«
    »To know any thing, returned the poet, we must know its effects; to see men
we must see their works, that we may learn what reason has dictated, or passion
has incited, and find what are the most powerful motives of action. To judge
rightly of the present we must oppose it to the past; for all judgment is
comparative, and of the future nothing can be known. The truth is, that no mind
is much employed upon the present: recollection and anticipation fill up almost
all our moments. Our passions are joy and grief, love and hatred, hope and fear.
Of joy and grief the past is the object, and the future of hope and fear; even
love and hatred respect the past, for the cause must have been before the
effect.
    The present state of things is the consequence of the former, and it is
natural to inquire what were the sources of the good that we enjoy, or of the
evil that we suffer. If we act only for ourselves, to neglect the study of
history is not prudent: if we are entrusted with the care of others, it is not
just. Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal; and he may properly be
charged with evil who refused to learn how he might prevent it.
    There is no part of history so generally useful as that which relates the
progress of the human mind, the gradual improvement of reason, the successive
advances of science, the vicissitudes of learning and ignorance, which are the
light and darkness of thinking beings, the extinction and resuscitation of arts,
and all the revolutions of the intellectual world. If accounts of battles and
invasions are peculiarly the business of princes, the useful or elegant arts are