Excerpt from The Works of the Right Honorable Joseph Addison, Vol. 4 of 6

Verses

Occasioned by Mr, Addison's Treatise on Medals.

See the wild waste of all-devouring years!

How Rome her own sad sepulchre appears:

With nodding arches, broken temples spread!

The very tombs now vanish'd like their dead!

Some felt the silent stroke of mould'ring age;

Some, hostile fury; some,religious rage:

Barbarian blindness, Christian zeal conspire,

And Papal piety, and Gothic fire.

Perhaps by its own ruins sav'd from flame,

Some bury'd marble half preserves a name;

That name, the learn'd with fierce disputes pursue,

And give to Titus old Vespasian's due.

Ambition sigh'd. She found it vain to trust

The faithless column, and the crumbling bust;

Huge moles whose shadow stretch'd from shore to shore,

Their ruins perish'd, and their place no more!

Convinc'd, she now contracts her vast design;

And all her triumphs shrink into a coin.

A narrow orb each crowded conquest keeps;

Beneath her palm here sad Judea weeps;

Now scantier limits the proud arch confine,

And scarce are seen the prostrate Nile and Rhine:

A small Euphrates through the piece is roll'd;

And little eagles wave their wings in gold.

The medal, faithful to its charge of fame,

Thro' climes and ages bears each form and name:

In one short view, subjected to our eye,

Gods, emp'rors, heroes, sages, beauties lie.

With sharpen'd sight pale antiquaries pore,

Th' inscription value, but the rust adore:

This, the blue varnish, that, the green endears,

The sacred rust of twice ten hundred years.

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