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
_treteau_ 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 Caesar 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_.
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