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31, 1863.] discovering that beneath the smiling sod and the sad-coloured earth, lie the scattered remnants of the ages that have gone. The successive waves of men that have passed over the globe have left traces as indelibly inscribed beneath our feet as the light ripples of the ocean, thousands upon thousands of years ago, have graven themsevlesthemselves [sic] upon the sandstone shores of the pre-adamite world.

Let us for a moment retrace the long Egyptian galleries that have given rise to these reflections. As we pass along, the self-same shadows from the statues of the gods fall upon us as darkened the white-robed priests of Isis four thousand years ago. We pass the Rosetta stone which alone retains the key of that language, in which the science and learning of the early ages of the world were inscribed. Those sculptured stones, as we proceed, as plainly as though they spoke, yield up traces of the Greek conquest of this ancient people, and as plainly we see succeeding these, the rougher marks of the Romans who followed. But time, the reader will say, has been resisted by enduring stone. This is true, but the extraordinary circumstance is, that the most perfect records of these long past ages, are to be found associated with the most fragile materials. As we ascend the stairs, for instance, towards the upper Egyptian gallery, we find the walls covered with the brightly painted hieroglyphics inscribed upon papyri born of the trembling reed. As we enter the mummy room, peopled with the silent dead, one of the first coffins that strikes our attention is that of King Men-ka-re, the builder of the third pyramid! And near it are the remnants of a body supposed to be a portion of that of the monarch himself. Together with the dust of kings there has been preserved to us, in these Egyptian tombs, an infinity of articles, which show us how this ancient people lived and moved and had their being. Herodotus gives us many microscopic pictures of the habits of this people in his time; but here we have before us their very surroundings, even the food they ate—the corn, the barley, the oats of which they made their bread, the very bread itself, and the remains of wild duck, roasted, and looking as though it had been only just cooked. The folding-chairs of the present day may have been copies of the one to be found in this section of the Museum, and the wig that once belonged to an Egyptian lady of rank may, from the brightness of its curls, have just left the curling-tongs of Truefitt. The balls, the jointed dolls, draughtsmen, and dice we see here, show that both children and men of this ancient race amused themselves pretty much as we do now.

Perhaps the most frequented stall at the late International Exhibition, was the one in the gallery devoted to the products of Egypt. Among these, appearing like a ghost at a festival, were the famous antiquities found in old Egyptian tombs. Nothing startled the spectator so much as being led back by these remains to a period coeval with many events related in the Bible. The well-made bronzed weapons, the gilt car, in the shape of a boat with rowers, representing the passage of the soul to another world, and (more interesting still to the ladies) a diadem, a necklace, and armlets of gold. How little the Pharaohs of that period imagined that their old-world art would be exhumed and laid before the curious eyes of a nation that in their day had not even begun its move westward, borne on the surges of the great Caucasian wave. Of all the remnants handed down to us by antiquity, the most wonderfully preserved are articles of pottery, glass, and gold; the first are almost absolutely indestructible, and gold, in consequence of its unoxidizable nature, is almost as everlasting. In the Italian Court, for instance, we all of us saw the old Etruscan jewellery, necklaces, and bracelets, as perfect as the day they heaved upon white bosoms, or clasped the delicate wrists of maidens of a race about whom history itself is silent.

In our own Museum again, the Etruscan vases, as perfect as when they came from the hands of the artist, are to be seen by the hundred. The mind can scarcely believe that these precious works were made long before the appearance of Christ upon earth. They look rather, in their modern glass cases, like the stock in trade of Minton’s shop, especially the Greek rhytons, or drinking horns, terminating in an animal’s head, one of which, shaped like a mule, is probably one of the most delicately designed and the most perfectly preserved work of art of its kind in existence.

It would seem as though Nature treasured up the features of the past in her bosom, in order to show to the children of the present, that our toys and geegaws are but reproductions of those of the most remote generations. We should recommend all those who seek to dive deeper into ancient history to study well before they write, what the spade has brought forth from the depths of Mother Earth. Can it be denied that Mr. Layard has made us better acquainted with the public and private life of the Assyrians, than all the historians who have written about them? How many eyes have gazed upon the sand mounds that covered ancient Nineveh, in ignorance that beneath them history itself lay buried! If the historians who wrote in their hazy way about the nations of antiquity, in the last century, had been told that Assyria lived beneath those mishapen mounds, or rather slept like the enchanted princess in the fairy tale, and that one day she would come forth and speak—tell us her tale, graven on enduring marble, and would show us through her royal halls, and take us to the steps of the throne of Sennacherib himself—would they not have smiled incredulously? What Rollin of the pen could tell us a hundredth part of what Layard has written for us with the spade? The stranger tired with his desultory wanderings in the British Museum, at last loiters into the long low gallery in which the spoils of Assyria are ranged. If he happen to be of an imaginative turn, he finds food enough around him to lire his flagging spirits. These sculptured slabs discover to him a picture history of one of the greatest eastern empires. He may see the very throne upon which Sardanapalus sat, and the sceptre he used, and,—we say it in order to show that we need not despair of having presented to us even the minutest details of the past,—we find the very studs, and buttons, and pins, that that mighty monarch probably wore, for they were