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Let the antiquarian go with his anxious nose almost touching the stone; let the Egyptologist peer through his glasses at hieroglyphs and puzzle out the meaning of cartouches: but let us wander at ease, and worship and regard the exquisite form, and drink in the mystical spirit, of this very wonderful temple. Do you care about form? Here you will find it in absolute perfection.
There are a few great painters, like Michelangelo or Leonardo, whose work has become a force in general culture, partly for this very reason that they have absorbed into themselves all such workmen as Sandro Botticelli; and, over and above mere technical or antiquarian criticism, general criticism may be very well employed in that sort of interpretation which adjusts the position of these men to general culture, whereas smaller men can be the proper subjects only of technical or antiquarian treatment.
Our debt is large to the antiquarian, who with conscientious precision lays broad and deep the foundations of historic truth; and no less to the philosophic annalist who exhibits man in the dress of public life, man in masquerade; but our gratitude must surely not be withheld from those, who, like Garcilasso de la Vega, and many a romancer of the Middle Ages, have held up the mirror distorted though it may somewhat be-to the interior of life, reflecting every object, the great and the mean the beautiful and the deformed, with their natural prominence and their vivacity of coloring, to the eye of the spectator.
Nothing now remains of this great structure save a few crumbling walls of red sandstone, which are carefully propped up and kept in the best possible repair by the citizens, who have at last come to realize the cash value of such a ruin. If such a realization had only come a hundred years ago, a great service would have been done the historian and the antiquarian.
Rome, with which, in conjunction with Greece, the associations of his frank and enthusiastic youth have been deeply formed, next rises to view: to the classical scholar, the antiquarian, the man of taste and virtue, the admirer of all that is most perfect in human conception, as brought into existence by the genius of Michael Angelo, and Raphael, this city affords rich and ample materials for study and description, though it is unable to excite that grandest feeling of the human breast, which is raised by the land of Leonidas and of Socrates.
We have here first to speak of those citizens, mostly Florentines, who made antiquarian interests one of the chief objects of their lives, and who were themselves either distinguished scholars, or else distinguished dilettanti who maintained the scholars.
Underneath it, at the back of the altar, an oil light is always burning; and below repose the bones of the holy man. The whole shore is fascinating to one in an idle mood, and is good mousing-ground for the antiquarian.
Couldn't I drop in there to lunch? It would make a fine paper for an antiquarian society." Again the woodman frowned. "Do as I bid you, son. You are too young and green to go on ventures by yourself. Keep to the straight road: shun the swamps and the fairy forest, else will you never see Ar-hap."
It is difficult to discuss the exact date of a moulding when soda-water bottles are popping beneath one's antiquarian nose. After all, archæologists are men, and sandwiches are sandwiches. It is at that moment perhaps that the Fading Flower is at her best. Her waning attractions are heightened artistically by the background of old fogies. Her sentiment blends with the poetry of the ruins around.
This attitude of suspense is not without precedent in archaeology. "Antiquarian lore," as Dr. Munro's very able arguments for adopting the second course, and deciding that the unfamiliar relics are assuredly impostures of yesterday's manufacture. Dr. Munro's acute and interesting book, Archaeology and False Antiquities, does not cover the whole of its amusing subject.
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