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To find yourself the only living being, surrounded on every side by the dead; to be the only thing that possesses the consciousness of existence, while millions of those who have once been as you are millions of all ages, from the infant who has just looked in upon this world, in its innocent road to heaven, to the aged, who has fallen in the fullness of years; and the young, the gay, and the beautiful of former centuries, lie all cold and silent around you: it is impossible that these deep and united feelings should not powerfully affect the mind, should not lead it to rivet its thoughts upon that last scene, which all are to act alone, and where, in the cold and unconscious company of the dead, we are here destined to "end the strange, eventful history" of our nature: But unfortunately, the guide, who now approaches you, insists upon your examining the details, which he conceives it is his duty to point out; and it is then that you discover, that this prevailing taste for producing effect, this love of the arrangements necessary to complete the spectacle, has invaded even this sacred receptacle.

The men are too lazy even to carry the fish out of their own boats. At home they lie about the doors, smoking and gossiping, and too often drunk. Some are too lazy to get drunk, and go to sleep over the effort. In truth, the prevailing indolence among all classes is so striking that one can almost imagine himself in a Southern clime.

The matter is completely his own, though the manner is assumed. Perhaps his ideas are altogether so marked and individual as to require their point and pungency to be neutralised by the affectation of a singular but traditional form of conveyance. Tricked out in the prevailing costume, they would probably seem more startling and out of the way.

At the same time I had come fresh from my writings upon art, in which I had attempted to explain the reasons for the decay of our public art, and especially of the theatre, by seeking to establish some connection between these reasons and the prevailing condition of culture.

The Statutes of Laborers.* The change which showed itself most promptly, the rise in the prevailing rate of wages, was met by the strenuous opposition of the law.

In a word, Gallomania had become the prevailing social epidemic of the time, and it could not fail to attack and metamorphose such a class as the Russian Noblesse, which possessed few stubborn deep-rooted national convictions.

The larger island is so placed as to receive primaeval immigration from three quarters from France, from the coast of Northern Germany and the Low Countries, and from Scandinavia, the transit being rendered somewhat easier in the last case by the prevailing winds and by the little islands which Scotland throws out, as resting-places and guides for the primaeval navigator, into the Northern Sea.

The news of that atrocity swept like wildfire throughout all Appalachia, its history is being reviewed to-day in thousands of mountain cabins, and it is deeply significant that, away out here in western Carolina, where no Allen blood relationship prejudices men's minds, the prevailing judgment of our backwoodsmen is that the State of Virginia did wrong in executing any of the offenders.

Cæsar remarks it as prevailing among the Britons; and there can be no doubt that the term Picti was merely a name given to those more northerly tribes of our countrymen who retained this custom after it had fallen into decay among their southern brethren, who were in reality of the same race with themselves, under the ascendancy of the arts and manners of their Roman conquerors.

This necessitated severe measures, both to allay the prevailing excitement and to preclude the recurrence of such acts.