Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 8.djvu/25

Rh of view. The narrow boundaries of classical chronology may be enlarged by these discoveries as the barriers of ancient geography were burst through by the adventurous prow of the Genoese navigator; events, dynasties, and personages, which flit before our strained eyes, far away in the dim offing of primeval history, shrouded in the fantastic haze of Hellenic mythology, may be revealed to us in more defined outlines, if not in perfect fulness of detail.

But it is not merely where there is such immediate promise of a great historical result that the Archaeologist must study written evidence, nor must lie confine his labours to the editing what is already complete as a document; he must out of isolated and fragmentary materials construct instruments for the historian to use.

Roman coins are not Fasti, nor are Greek coins a treatise on ancient geography, yet the labour of numismatists has made the one almost the best authority for the chronology of the Roman empire, and has found in the other an inestimable commentary on Strabo and Ptolemy.

The seals, deeds, and sepulchral brasses of the Middle Ages are not in themselves pedigrees, but how have they not contributed to the legal proof of genealogies? The countless rolls relating to the property of individuals preserved in muniment rooms, seem many of them of little historical value; but out of them what a full and minute history of ancient tenures has been developed; what directories, and gazetteers, and inventories of the past, giving us the names, titles, and addresses of those historic personages, whom in reading the old chronicles we are perpetually liable to confound.

The pioneering labour which prepares the Literature of Documents will always be appreciated by a great historical mind. After a Gruter, an Eckhel, and a Muratori, come a Gibbon, a Niebuhr, a Sismondi.

Before we dismiss this branch of our subject, there is one more point to be noted, the use of written documents not for the immediate purposes of history, but subordinately, as evidence for archaeological classification. It is obviously easier to fix the date of an inscribed than of an uninscribed work of art, because Palæography has rules of criticism of its own, perfectly independent of those by which we judge of art or fabric. In arranging the Monumental evidence of Archaeology, we cannot dispense with the collateral illustration