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Yet for the ordinary human being it is far more important that he should read great masterpieces in a spirit of lively and enthusiastic sympathy than that he should wade into them through a mass of archaeological and philological detail. As a boy I used to have to prepare, on occasions, a play of Shakespeare for a holiday task.
Jawed about apses and things." "And thereby," said Psmith, "hangs a tale. I've been making inquiries of a stout sportsman in a sort of Salvation Army uniform, whom I met in the grounds he's the school sergeant or something, quite a solid man and I hear that Comrade Outwood's an archaeological cove. Goes about the country beating up old ruins and fossils and things.
Do I not remember visiting the Palatine with a friend bursting with archaeological information, who led us from room to room, and identified all by means of a folding plan, to find at the conclusion that he had begun at the wrong end, and that even the central room was not identified correctly, because the number of rooms was even, and not odd?
Nor did he by any means forget grammar, but in explaining the classics he always laid most stress upon the contents, and every lesson of his was a clever archaeological, aesthetic, and historical lecture. I listened to none more instructive at the university.
Later he voluntarily informed me how much he, who had pursued philological, archaeological, Sanscrit, and Germanistic studies, had been impeded in his youth by having neglected the Semitic languages, which are more nearly allied to the Egyptian.
The commune treated these stones as rubbish until some accidental visitor offered 500 francs for them; now it clings to them tightly, hoping, no doubt, that the price will go up. Prowling curiosity-hunters are destined to destroy much of the archaeological interest of these old towns. They are doing to them what Lord Elgin did to the Parthenon.
On looking over these very voluminous papers he became penetrated with an almost Chinese reverence for his ancestor and, after getting the Archaeological Society to absolve him from his promise to write the memoir, set about a full life of Dr. Butler, which was not published till 1896.
So a treaty was made, and Dr. Baker remained a member of the household the rest of Burton's life. To this period belong the following unpublished anecdotes. Of Burton's interest in Ancient Etruria and especially in the archaeological discoveries at Bologna we have already spoken. Once when he and Dr. Baker were visiting Bologna they took a long walk outside the town and quite lost their bearings.
In my childlike enthusiasm I determined to read all the books that Goethe says that he read as a boy, and thus commenced and finished Winckelmann's collected works, Lessing's Laocoon and other books of artistic and archaeological research; in other words, studied the history and philosophy of Art in the first instance under aspects which, from the point of view of subsequent research, were altogether antiquated, though in themselves, and in their day, valuable enough.
This had helped us to fill in the gap between the famous Sargon of Akkad and the later dynasties, but it did not carry us far beyond Sargon's own time. Our archaeological evidence also comes suddenly to an end. Thus the earliest picture we have hitherto obtained of the Sumerians has been that of a race employing an advanced system of writing and possessed of a knowledge of metal.
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