The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveler from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.

This passage is attributed to Horace Walpole in the mid–18th century, when Britain’s imperial reach and commercial power were expanding even as anxieties about cultural decline and the transience of empires were common in elite discourse. Walpole imagines the “Augustan age” (a shorthand for a peak of literary and scientific achievement, modeled on classical Rome and on Britain’s own early-18th-century “Augustan” writers) migrating to the Americas. By projecting future historians, poets, and scientists onto Boston, New York, Mexico, and Peru, he frames the New World as the eventual inheritor of European civilization, while England becomes an archaeological curiosity—its great monuments reduced to picturesque ruins described by foreign travelers.

Walpole’s conceit turns the usual colonial gaze upside down. Instead of Europeans touring ancient ruins abroad, a traveler from Lima surveys the remnants of London, treating St. Paul’s as later antiquarians treated Balbec (Baalbek) and Palmyra. The quote expresses an Enlightenment-era sense that cultural supremacy is not permanent: learning, eloquence, and scientific genius can shift with power and prosperity. It also carries an ironic, almost satirical edge—England’s self-confidence is punctured by the reminder that even its proudest institutions may become relics. The list of classical names (Thucydides, Xenophon, Virgil, Newton) suggests that “greatness” is historically contingent and repeatable in new places.