“Not wounded:  killed,” and thereupon expired.  The Past is full of such incidents; and so inspiring are they that Death comes to be regarded as a most stirring adventure.  The archaeologist, too, better than any other, knows the vastness of the dead men’s majority; and if, like the ancients, he believes in the Elysian fields, where no death is and decay is unknown, he alone will realise the excellent nature of the company into which he will there be introduced.

There is, however, far more living going on in the world than dying; and there is more happiness (thanks be!) than sorrow.  Thus the archaeologist has a great deal more of pleasure than of pain to give to us for our enrichment.  The reader will here enter an objection.  He will say:  “This may be true of archaeology in general, but in the case of Egyptology, with which we are here mostly concerned, he surely has to deal with a sad and solemn people.”  The answer will be found in the next chapter.  No nation in the world’s history has been so gay, so light-hearted as the ancient Egyptians; and Egyptology furnishes, perhaps, the most convincing proof that archaeology is, or should be, a merry science, very necessary to the gaiety of the world.  I defy a man suffering from his liver to understand the old Egyptians; I defy a man who does not appreciate the pleasure of life to make anything of them.  Egyptian archaeology presents a pageant of such brilliancy that the archaeologist is often carried along by it as in a dream, down the valley and over the hills, till, Past blending with Present, and Present with Future, he finds himself led to a kind of Island of the Blest, where death is forgotten and only the joy of life, and life’s good deeds, still remain; where pleasure-domes, and all the ancient “miracles of rare device,” rise into the air from above the flowers; and where the damsel with the dulcimer beside the running stream sings to him of Mount Abora and of the old heroes of the elder days.  If the Egyptologist or the archaeologist could revive within him one-hundredth part of the elusive romance, the delicate gaiety, the subtle humour, the intangible tenderness, the unspeakable goodness, of much that is to be found in his province, one would have to cry, like Coleridge—­

             “Beware, beware! 

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.”

PART II.

STUDIES IN THE TREASURY.

“And I could tell thee stories that would make thee laugh at all thy trouble, and take thee to a land of which thou hast never even dreamed.  Where the trees have ever blossoms, and are noisy with the humming of intoxicated bees.  Where by day the suns are never burning, and by night the moonstones ooze with nectar in the rays of the camphor-laden moon.  Where the blue lakes