Sometimes, then, in our race from day to day it is necessary to stop the
headlong progress of experience, and, for an hour, to look back upon the
past. Often, before we remember to direct our mind to it, that past is
already blurred, and dim. The picture is out of focus, and turning from
it in sorrow instantly the flight of our time begins again. This should
not be. "There is," says Emerson, "a relationship between the hours of
our life and the centuries of time." Let us give history and archæology
its due attention; for thus not only shall we be rendering a service to
all the dead, not only shall we be giving a reason and a usefulness to
their lives, but we shall also lend to our own thought a balance which
in no otherwise can be obtained, we shall adjust ourselves to the true
movement of the world, and, above all, we shall learn how best to serve
that nation to which it is our inestimable privilege to belong.




CHAPTER II.

THE EGYPTIAN EMPIRE.


"History," says Sir J. Seeley, "lies before science as a mass of
materials out of which a political doctrine can be deduced.... Politics
are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades
into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical
politics.... Politics and history are only different aspects of the same
study."[1]