ver upon the same level with the studious
investigator. The cumbrous details, too, of sixty centuries piled upon
one mind would crush it, unless human nature were a very different thing
from that which we now behold. It is in accordance with a wise plan of
Providence that the deeds of past ages should perish with them, except
the few needed to cast their gleam of light upon the world's future
pathway. We are made capable of rescuing just enough for the highest
purposes of life, not enough to overwhelm and burden us in our march
toward the goal before us. It is thought by some that the point and
finish of the ancient Greek authors, as compared with the moderns, is
attributable to the fact that they were less perplexed with accumulated
lore and the multiplication of books and subjects of study. Their minds
were not subject to the dissipating effects of large libraries, and
daily newspapers with telegraphs from Asia, Africa, and Hesperia. I
shall not discuss this question. The amount of information handed down
from past ages even _now_ is but as the spray which rises above the
ocean's surface to the vast depths which lie below. The historical
fossils of those ages are therefore left to exercise the genius of the
Cuviers of historical inquiry. As that naturalist could, from a single
bone of an extinct animal species, make up and describe the animal, so
have inquirers into the past succeeded in picturing a departed age from
the few relics left of it. Hence we are treated occasionally with such
agreeable surprises in the march of history as the discovery of Pompeii,
Herculaneum, and Nineveh. The genius of our Wincklemanns, Champollions,
Humboldts, and Layards has found a worthy field. Such days as that I am
attempting to describe, representing seven centuries of a modern capital
before the admiring eyes of the present generation of its people, become
possible. Instead of the monotony of a perpetual observation, we have
the charm of alternate lulls and surprises.

This picture has a further likeness to the naturalist's description made
from the fossils of extinct genera of animals. In the latter the animal
is made to stand before us. We have the data necessary to infer his
habits. But we see him not perfect in his wilderness home of unnumbered
ages past. We see him not the pursuer or the pursued; we hear not the
fierce growls or the plaintive note of alarm or distress. These we must
imagine. So, too, the slowly and peacefully m