Ruined cities, defaced
temples, broken statues,--relics such as on the Eastern Continent, from
the Straits of Gibraltar to the shores of the Ganges, mark the sites of
fallen empires and extinct civilizations,--relics such as we should have
expected, from _a priori_ reasoning, to meet with in the corresponding
latitudes of the New World,--lie scattered through their whole extent,
proclaiming themselves the works of men who lived in settled communities
and under regular forms of government, who had some knowledge of
architecture and some rude notions of the beautiful and the sublime, who
had strong feelings and vivid conceptions in regard to the agency of
supernal powers in the control of human affairs, but who clothed their
conceptions in uncouth forms, and worshipped their deities with absurd
and debasing rites. Some of these remains being known to Mr. Wilson,
on the evidence of the only pair of eyes in the universe which, in his
estimation, have the faculty of seeing, he cannot treat them, according
to his usual method in such cases, as fabrications of Spanish priests
and lying chroniclers. How, then, does he account for them? He unfolds
a theory on the subject, which he has stolen from the "monkish
chroniclers" whom he treats with so much contempt, and which has long
ago been exploded and set aside.
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