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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: EPISTLE TO MB. ADDISON. OCCASIONED RY HIS DIALOGUES OK 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! Imperial wonders rais'd on nations spoil'd, Where mix'd with slaves the groaning martyr toil'd: Huge theatres, that now unpeopled woods, Now drain'd a distant country of her floods; Fanes, which admiring gods with pride survey, Statues of men, scarce less alive than they! Some felt the silent stroke of mouldering 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 buried 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; Hugh 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 or 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, Through climes and ages bears each form and name: In one short view subjected to our eye, Gods, emperors, 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! To gain Pescennius one employs hi...

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