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the splendour of the world, as the world has been in the times that have preceded ours, might not Fama-gusta be taken as in some measure the symbol? And what was Famagusta now ? Its beautiful cathe-dral, on the breast .of a dead Christianity, itself no longer Christian, was a part and parcel of death, reposing there like a useless forget-me-not on a coffin. And for the rest, what remained of it? Only its prayerless churches, which sheltered nothing but beasts, and the huge shell of its forgotten towers and ramparts, which resisted now no enemy but Time. And yet, in spite of their melancholy, the sugges-tions of a place like this have a comfort for the mind in some of its moods, deeper than any hope. To a man, whatever may be his creed, they bring images and promises of rest ; whilst for one who has taken his creed from modern science, and has logic enough to understand it with scientific precision, their sug-gestions, whether of comfort or not, are suggestions of a profound truth—the burden of the whole new gospel, a burden in every sense—that all effort and that all achievement is a delusion, and what unites us at last to reality is not life but death. It is strange to look back on what were the world's hopes once ; and then to think that ' to this favour they may come.' Lord Beaconsfield makes one of his characters say that ' the age of ruins is past.' It may occur to some minds, as they look around them now, to think that the age of ruins is only just beginning. 272 IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

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