Cranwells, near Bath.
The beautiful conception of the New Zealander at some future period
visiting England, and giving a sketch of the ruins of London, noticed in
"N. & Q." as having been suggested to Macaulay by a passage in one of
Walpole's letters to Sir H. Mann, will be found more broadly expressed in
Kirke White's Poem on Time. Talking of the triumphs of Oblivion, he says:
"Meanwhile the Arts, in second infancy,
Rise in some distant clime; and then, perchance,
Some bold adventurer, fill'd with golden dreams,
Steering his bark through trackless solitudes,
Where, to his wandering thoughts, no daring prow
Had ever plough'd before,--espies the cliffs
Of fallen Albion. To the land unknown
He journeys joyful; and perhaps descries
Some vestige of her ancient stateliness:
Then he with vain conjecture fills his mind
Of the unheard-of race, which had arrived
At science in that solitary nook,
Far from the civil world; and sagely sighs,
And moralises on the state of man."
This hardly reads like a borrowed idea; and I should lean to a belief that
it was not. Kirke White's _Poems and Letters_ are but too little read.