MACAULAY'S NEW ZEALANDER.

Evening Star, Issue 3196, 19 May 1873, Page 3

MACAULAY'S NEW ZEALANDER.

Headers of newspapirs and magazines arc perhaps too intimately acquainted with Macaulay’s “ New Zealander”—that rather tiresome traveller of the future who is to visit the ruins of London, and who will indulge in the melancholy and moral reflections which such a spectacle should awaken in the ptfopcyly regulated mind. In the meantime, writers of leading articles have made “ a useful man” of him, and have put him to all kinds of sent mental work. But, as is well known, he is no child of Macaulay’s; he had been making his prospective archeological journeys long before Macaulay was boru. Uc was to come from Pe u, from Alaska, from the An'ipode?, from nowhere in particular ; and he was to sigh over the mins of New York and Philadelphia as well as of London, or, indeed, over any ruins; the main point was the moral. Mrs iarbauld knew him in 1811 “On some future day a traveller from the Antipodes will, from a broken arch of Blackfriars Bridge, contemplate the ruins of St. Paul’s.” There can lie no doubt that this is the identical individual—Macaulay’s own man. A few years earlier, about 1803, Kirke White had a faint glimpse of him “ Where now in Britain ?

Her palace and halls ? * * * o’er her marts, Her crowded ports, broods silence.” “ * * * the savage sits upon the stone That marks where stood her capitols,* &c. “ * * * and perhaps discovers Some vestige of her ancient stateliness.”

Ten or a dozen years before White, Richard Alsop, of Connecticut, one of the Hertford wits, announced the arrival of this same traveller from “ * * * his distant homo From western shores with brilliant cities graced ” , “ Where now Alaska lifts her forests rude”— to stray, “contemplative.” “ Where Philadelphia caught the admiring gaze, ’Mid ambient waves whore York’s emporium shone, Or fair Bostoniu graced her Eastern throne.” He hears no human voice—only “ * * * the moan of y/iuda that sigh O’er a, shattered pflje and broken Stone. ”

In 1760 or ’62, thirty years earlier, Gold-, smith describes the man and bis feelings in the “Citizen of tho World,,” London, itself, he says, will fade away some day, and leave a desert in its room. ''The sorrowful traveller wanders over tho awful ruins, and as he beholds he learns wisdom and feels the transience of every sublunary possession, ‘Here,’ he cries, ‘stood their oitodel, now grown over with weeds ; there their Senate House, now the hauut of every noxious reptile ; temples aud theatres stood here,’ ” &c. Alsop’s man also notices the noxious reptiles, aud delines it “By some grey tomb by withering fern o’erspread Slow rears the rattlesnake his glistening crest, And fills with dreadful sounds the dreary waste.” Horace Walpole’s “Curious traveller from Lima” appears to be the same man, and is not the Agrioola of the Georgies who rests “contemplative ” upon his plough to moralise over what he has turned up in the furrow—- “ Grandia que effossis mirabitur ossa cliris"an earlier avatar of this venerable personage ? He can be traced back beyond the middle of the last century, and there is reason to sus pect his existence hundreds of years before. Wc believe him to be the Wandering Jew of literature.— N. Y. Nation.