The Pyramids looked down on Waterloo; but the headlands of Bantry Bay concealed the mastery, and the mystery, of the seas.
With 1811 was born the era of Charles Peace, no less than of John Bull--on Sundays and Saint's days a churchwarden, who carried the plate; on week days a burglar who lifted it.

Truly, as John Mitchel said on his convict hulk: "On English felony the sun never sets." May it set in 1915.
From Napoleon's downfall to the battle of Colenso, the Empire founded by Henry VIII has swelled to monstrous size.

Innumerable free peoples have bit the dust and died with plaintive cries to heaven.

The wealth of London has increased a thousand fold, and the giant hotels and caravanserais have grown, at the millionaire's touch, to rival the palaces of the Caesars.
"All's well with God's world"-- and poet and plagiarist, courtier and courtesan, Kipling and cant--these now dally by the banks of the Thames and dine off the peoples of the earth, just as once the degenerate populace of imperial Rome fed upon the peoples of the Pyramids.

But the thing is near the end.