torcs of twisted gold they wore about their necks, the sacrificial
knives that slew the victims on the altars of Odin; so, too, what our
fathers have carved and spun, moulded, cast, and portrayed, until
we took up the task of life. In another place you found the great
collection made in Egypt by Lepsius. The visitor stood within the
facsimile of a temple on the banks of the Nile. On the walls and
lotus-shaped columns were processions of dark figures at the loom,
at the work of irrigation, marching as soldiers, or mourners at
funerals,--exact copies of the original delineations. There were
sphinx and obelisk, coffins of kings, mummies of priest and chieftain,
the fabrics they wore, the gems they cut, the scrolls they engrossed,
the tomb in which they were buried. Stepping into another section, you
were in Assyria, with the alabaster lions and plumed genii of the men
of Nineveh and Babylon. The walls again were brilliant, now with the
splendour of the palaces of Nebuchadnezzar; the captives building
temples, the chivalry sacking cities, the princes on their thrones.
Here too was Etruria revealed in her sculpture and painted vases; and
here too the whole story of Greece. Passing through these wonderful
halls, you reviewed a thousand years and more, almost from the epoch
of Cadmus, through the vicissitudes of empire and servitude, until
Constantinople was sacked by the Turks. The rude Pelasgic altar, the
sculptured god of Praxiteles, then down through the ages of decay to
the ugly painting of the Byzantine monk in the Dark Ages. So too the
whole history of Rome; the long heave of the wave from Romulus until
it becomes crested with the might and beauty of the Augustan age;
the sad subsidence from that summit to Goth and Hun. There was
architecture which the eyes of the Tarquins saw, there were statues of
the great consuls of the Republic, the luxury of the later Empire. You
saw it not only in models, but sometimes in actual relics. One's
blood thrilled when he stood before a statue of Julius Caesar, whose