[Footnote 1: E. Dicey. 'The Story of the Khedivate,' p. 528.]

I will reserve the enlarging of this subject for the next chapter: for
the present we may consider, as a second argument, the efficacy of the
past as a tonic to the present, and its ability to restore the vitality
of any age that is weakened.

In ancient Egypt at the beginning of the XXVIth Dynasty (B.C. 663) the
country was at a very low ebb. Devastated by conquests, its people
humiliated, its government impoverished, a general collapse of the
nation was imminent. At this critical period the Egyptians turned their
minds to the glorious days of old. They remodelled their arts and crafts
upon those of the classical periods, introduced again the obsolete
offices and titles of those early times, and organised the government
upon the old lines. This movement saved the country, and averted its
collapse for a few more centuries. It renewed the pride of workmanship
in a decadent people; and on all sides we see a revival which was the
direct result of an archæological experiment.

The importance of archæology as a reviver of artistic and industrial
culture will be realised at once if the essential part it played in the
great Italian Renaissance is called to mind. Previous to the age of
Cimabue and Giotto in Florence, Italian refinement had passed steadily
down the path of deterioration. Græco-Roman art, which still at a high
level in the early centuries of the Christian era, entirely lost its
originality during Byzantine times, and the dark ages settled down upon
Italy in almost every walk of life. The Venetians, for example, were
satisfied with comparatively the poorest works of art imported from
Constantinople or Mount Athos: and in Florence so great was the poverty
of genius that when Cimabue in the thirteenth century painted that