the nineteenth century, from that
busy valley of the Nile; when the second Rameses reigned in all his
glory; when precise artists were ruling geometrical lines upon stones
to make their careful drawings; and painters, with their palm-fibre
brushes, all unconscious of the critics that lay yet silently in the
womb of time, who would shovel the dust and dirt of centuries from
before their works, and tell the story of Rameses from these rude
revelations. Curious thoughts crowd in every busy brain, before these
strange relics. Lost in the depths of the past, the mind, with a leap,
often grasps at the future; and men will be found seriously saying to
themselves, as they notice how we depend for our knowledge of ancient
Egyptian fabrics upon the shrouds of ancient Egyptians,--what, if we
looked forward, and in the remote centuries that are rolling toward
us, see all our vast and busy Lancashire some layers underground, and
archaeologists busy with our winding sheet! Well, at the least, these
thoughts are not idle. It does all of us good to think often of what
has been, and to dream of the future to which we are driving "down the
ringing grooves of time"--to think sometimes of the fine people who
had their glorious days, when London was distributed, untouched by
human hands, in clayey strata, and remote stone quarries; and
hereabouts, to the minds of the Greeks, lay the islands of the
blessed.

The visitor should now proceed southward into the room called The
Bronze Room. Here are collected the ancient bronzes of which the
Museum trustees are in possession; including specimens of the fine
castings of ancient Greece, which, with all our modern contrivances,
we cannot surpass in the present day. The cases to the left are filled
with a supplementary collection of the remains of ancient Egyptian
art, for which space could not be found in the Egyptian room. These
occupy no less than twenty-six cases. The first eleven cases (1-11)
are filled with various sepulchral fragments in various substances,
and porcelain and terra-cotta figures, which the visitor who has just
emerged from the Egyptian room will again recognise. Here the strange
figures of the Egyptian deities occur again and again; but the visitor
should pause before the case 10, 11, in which are deposited models of
the Egyptian funeral boats, in stone and wood, from Thebes, and on the
fourth shelf a Roman caricature on papyrus, representing lions and
goats playing at dice, a