Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers, vol 2 | Page 5

a mule in
certain prejudices, had said plaintively, querulously, piteously,--'Ah,
Doctor, we are poor creatures, we men of the eighteenth century, by
comparison with our forefathers!' 'Oh, no, my Lord,' said Johnson, 'we
are quite as strong as our ancestors, and a great deal wiser.' Yes; our
kick is, at least, as dangerous, and our logic does three times as much
execution. This would be a complex topic to treat effectively; and I
wish merely to indicate the opening which it offers for a most decisive
order of arguments in such a controversy. If the Earth were on her last
legs, we her children could not be very strong or healthy. Whereas, if
there were less pedantry amongst us, less malice, less falsehood, and
less darkness of prejudice, easy it would be to show, that in almost
every mode of intellectual power, we are more than a match for the
most conceited of elder generations, and that in some modes we have
energies or arts absolutely and exclusively our own. Amongst a
thousand indications of strength and budding youth, I will mention
two:--Is it likely, is it plausible, that our Earth should just begin to find
out effective methods of traversing land and sea, when she had a
summons to leave both? Is it not, on the contrary, a clear presumption
that the great career of earthly nations is but on the point of opening,
that life is but just beginning to kindle, when the great obstacles to
effectual locomotion, and therefore to extensive human intercourse, are
first of all beginning to give way? Secondly, I ask peremptorily,--Does
it stand with good sense, is it reasonable that Earth is waning, science
drooping, man looking downward, precisely in that epoch when, first of
all, man's eye is arming itself for looking effectively into the mighty
depths of space? A new era for the human intellect, upon a path that
lies amongst its most aspiring, is promised, is inaugurated, by Lord
Rosse's almost awful telescope.
What is it then that Lord Rosse has accomplished? If a man were

aiming at dazzling by effects of rhetoric, he might reply: He has
accomplished that which once the condition of the telescope not only
refused its permission to hope for, but expressly bade man to despair of.
What is it that Lord Rosse has revealed? Answer: he has revealed more
by far than he found. The theatre to which he has introduced us, is
immeasurably beyond the old one which he found. To say that he found,
in the visible universe, a little wooden theatre of Thespis, a _tréteau_ or
shed of vagrants, and that he presented us, at a price of toil and of
anxiety that cannot be measured, with a Roman colosseum,--that is to
say nothing. It is to undertake the measurement of the tropics with the
pocket-tape of an upholsterer. Columbus, when he introduced the Old
World to the New, after all that can be said in his praise, did in fact
only introduce the majority to the minority; but Lord Rosse has
introduced the minority to the majority. There are two worlds, one
called Ante-Rosse, and the other Post-Rosse; and, if it should come to
voting, the latter would shockingly outvote the other. Augustus Cæsar
made it his boast when dying, that he had found the city of Rome built
of brick, and that he left it built of marble: _lateritiam invenit,
marmoream reliquit_. Lord Rosse may say, even if to-day he should die,
'I found God's universe represented for human convenience, even after
all the sublime discoveries of Herschel, upon a globe or spherical chart
having a radius of one hundred and fifty feet; and I left it sketched upon
a similar chart, keeping exactly the same scale of proportions, but now
elongating its radius into one thousand feet.' The reader of course
understands that this expression, founded on absolute calculations of Dr.
Nichol, is simply meant to exhibit the relative dimensions of the
_mundus Ante-Rosseanus_ and the _mundus Post-Rosseanus;_ for as
to the absolute dimensions, when stated in miles, leagues or any units
familiar to the human experience, they are too stunning and
confounding. If, again, they are stated in larger units, as for instance
diameters of the earth's orbit, the unit itself that should facilitate the
grasping of the result, and which really is more manageable
numerically, becomes itself elusive of the mental grasp: it comes in as
an interpreter; and (as in some other cases) the interpreter is hardest to
be understood of the two. If, finally, TIME be assumed as the exponent
of the dreadful magnitudes, time combining itself with motion, as in the
flight of cannon-balls or the flight of swallows, the sublimity becomes

greater; but horror seizes upon the reflecting intellect, and incredulity
upon the irreflective.