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TREASURE TOMBS AT MYKENÆ cousins in their comments upon our acquaintance with those paths of culture to which they have long been wonted, and which are supposed to lead to sweetness and light. For years they have accused us of too much pedantry and refinement in our life and letters. They have deprecated our hankering for the methods and relics of the Old World, for "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." They have berated us for neglecting the home field, for our inability to discover American themes and properly treat them. Yet when some veritable success is reached by Americans in a field of which they claim the usufruct, they strike a different attitude, and we are treated to sneers at our ignorance, boorishness, and lack of scholastic feeling. It may be, as The Saturday Review implies, that it was necessary for us to purchase the Cesnola collection, seeing that therefrom, "as years roll on, American ladies will learn that Phoenician is not the European way of pronouncing Venetian, and popular education will thrive immensely." But the majority of the readers of The Tribune are more familiar with the geography of Europe than any thousand men you can find in London are with that of these United States. I need not speak of the additional charm which for us our very isolation bestows upon the antique. But let me cite a fact which has its application. I am told that in this modern mercantile city of New York a "Greek Club" has been in healthful and vigorous existence for the last nineteen years. It consists of a dozen gentlemen, gathered from various callings, who meet weekly at one another's houses, [231]