Why is it, one asks, that archaeology is a thing so misunderstood?  Can it be that both lecturer and audience have crushed down that which was in reality uppermost in their minds:  that a shy search for romance has led these people to the Town Hall?  Or perchance archaeology has become to them something not unlike a vice, and to listen to an archaeological lecture is their remaining chance of being naughty.  It may be that, having one foot in the grave, they take pleasure in kicking the moss from the surrounding tombstones with the other; or that, being denied, for one reason or another, the jovial society of the living, like Robert Southey’s “Scholar” their hopes are with the dead.

[Illustration:  PL.  VI.  A relief upon the side of the sarcophagus of one
                       of the wives of King Mentuhotep III., discovered
                       at Der el Bahri (Thebes).  The royal lady is taking
                       sweet-smelling ointment from an alabaster vase. 
                       A handmaiden keeps the flies away with a
                       bird’s-wing fan. 
                       —­CAIRO MUSEUM.]

[Photo by E. Brugsch Pasha.

Be the explanation what it may, the fact is indisputable that archaeology is patronised by those who know not its real meaning.  A man has no more right to think of the people of old as dust and dead bones than he has to think of his contemporaries as lumps of meat.  The true archaeologist does not take pleasure in skeletons as skeletons, for his whole effort is to cover them decently with flesh and skin once more, and to put some thoughts back into the empty skulls.  He sets himself to hide again the things which he would not intentionally lay bare.  Nor does he delight in ruined buildings:  rather he deplores that they are ruined.  Coleridge wrote like the true archaeologist when he composed that most magical poem “Khubla Khan”—­

“In Xanadu did Khubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree: 
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man

        Down to a sunless sea.”

And those who would have the pleasure-domes of the gorgeous Past reconstructed for them must turn to the archaeologist; those who would see the damsel with the dulcimer in the gardens of Xanadu must ask of him the secret, and of none other.  It is true that, before he can refashion the dome or the damsel, he will have to grub his way through old refuse heaps till he shall lay bare the ruins of the walls and expose the bones of the lady.  But this is the “dirty work”; and the mistake which is made lies here:  that this preliminary dirty work is confused with the final clean result.  An artist will sometimes build up his picture of Venus from a skeleton bought from an old Jew round the corner; and the smooth white paper which he uses will have been made from putrid rags and bones.  Amongst painters themselves these facts are not hidden, but