Churchill Babington

“ But time forbids me to say more of sepulchral brasses, a class of antiquities almost confined to our own country, of which we have some few specimens as late as the seventeenth century, or to do more than allude to the beautiful sepulchral monuments in stone of the medieval period, with which we are all more or less familiar.
The most remarkable art to which the middle age gave birth was oil-painting, the very queen of all the fine arts, though it was to the age of the Medici that its immense development was due. Previously painting had been subordinated to architecture ”

“ The history of a nation, said the first Napoleon, is its coinage: and the art which the Greeks invented became soon afterwards, and now is, the history of the world. Numismatics are the epitome of all archæological knowledge, and any one who is versed in this study must by necessity be more or less acquainted with many others also. Architecture, sculpture, iconography, topography, palæography, the public and private life of the ancients and their mythology, are all illustrated by numismatics, and reciprocally illustrate them. ”

“ There are many other objects of medieval art not unworthy of being enlarged upon, which I intentionally pass over lightly, lest their multiplicity should distract us; thus I will say little of its pottery, its coins, or of its sculptures and bas-reliefs in stone. With regard to the first of them, M. Labarte observes: “It is not until the beginning of the fifteenth century that we find among the European nations any pottery, but such as has been designed for the commonest domestic use, and none that art has been pleased to decorate.” ”

“ From Greece, who taught Rome most or all that she ever knew of the arts, we pass to the contemplation of the mistress of the world herself. She found indeed in her own vicinity an earlier civilisation, the Etruscan, whose archæological remains and history generally are amongst the most obscure and perplexing matters in all the world of fore-time. The sepulchral and other monuments of Etruria are often inscribed, but no ingenuity has yet interpreted them. ”

“ Archæology is worthily employed in illustrating every kind of ancient literature; most worthily of all does she occupy herself in the illustration and explanation and confirmation of the sacred writings, of the Book of books. ”

“ I regret to say that some eminent men have tried to throw discredit, and even ridicule, on the attempts which, I think, have been most laudably made with great patience, great acuteness, and great learning, to decipher and interpret the Egyptian and other ancient languages. ”

“ In a certain sense every archæologist must be a collector; he must be mentally in possession of a mass of facts and objects, brought together either by himself or by others. It is not absolutely necessary that he should be a collector, in the sense of being owner of a collection of his objects of study; in some departments indeed of archæology to amass the objects themselves is impossible: who, for instance, can collect Roman roads or Gothic cathedrals? models, plans, and drawings, are the only substitutes possible. ”

“ The improvement in drawing and colouring is a compensation for the more striking effects of the brilliant yet mysterious examples of the preceding centuries; and the end of the fourteenth century is one of the finest epochs in the history of painted glass. Painting on glass followed the progress of painting in oils in the age which followed; and artists more and more aimed at producing individual works ”

“ It is doubtless one of the many charms of archæology that it illustrates and is illustrated by literature; indeed, some knowledge of antiquity is little less than necessary for every man of letters. Unless we have some knowledge of the objects whose names occur in ancient literature, we lose half the pleasure of reading it. ”

“ For while there are but few who would deny that many of the very choicest relics of ancient art and of ancient history are to be sought for in the Greek and Roman saloons and cabinets of the museums of Europe, yet it must at the same time be admitted that there are other branches of archæology, which are far too 8important to be neglected, and which have an interest, and often a very high interest, of their own. ”

“ Without it we cannot judge of the value of many antiques, or enter into their spirit or feeling; we neither discern their excellencies nor their deficiencies. Mr King, who has made the province of ancient gems peculiarly his own, justly calls them “little monuments of perfect taste, ... only to be appreciated by the educated and practised eye [23] .” Moreover, this is the very knowledge often so requisite for distinguishing genuine antiquities from modern counterfeits. The modern forgers, who fabricate Greek coins from false dies, do not often reach the freedom and beauty of the originals ”

“ Syria, Mesopotamia, Assyria, and India, are the intermediate links. In all these countries, when they become known to us, we find the people cultivating the soil, dwelling in cities, and practising the mechanical arts, while their neighbours lie in barbarism and ignorance. We cannot, he thinks, fix by direct historical evidence the transmission of this earliest civilisation from one country to another. But we may determine with which of them ancient history and archæology must begin. The monuments of Egypt surpass those of all the rest, as it would appear, by many centuries. ”

“ To the judgment of such a man, who has spent a great part of his life in the study of Egyptian antiquities, though he has splendidly illustrated other antiquities also, I must think that greater weight should be attached than to the judgment of others, eminent as they may be in some branches of learning, who have never studied this as a specialty. ”

“ Certain small Greek copper coins of Italy, Sicily, &c., are exceedingly beautiful.
With regard to ancient iconography in general, coins, without doubt, afford the greatest aid; but no certain coin-portraits are, I believe, earlier than Alexander [17] . The oldest Greek portrait-statue known to me is that of Mausolus, now in the British Museum; but the majority of the statues of Greek philosophers and others are probably to be referred to the Roman times, when the formation of portrait-galleries became a favourite pursuit. ”

“ I thus conclude my sketch, such as it is, of the archæology of the world. Its aim has been to bring under review the rude implements and weapons of primeval man; the colossal structures of civilised man in Egypt and India; the strangely-compounded palace-sculptures of Assyria and Babylonia; the exquisitely ornamented columns of 62Persian halls; the massive architecture of Phœnicia; the Gothic-like rock-tombs of Lycia; the lovely temples, and incomparable works of art of every kind, great and small, of Greece; the military impress of Roman conquest ”

“ Before passing from these pre-historic remains, as they are badly called, to the historic, let me beg you to observe a striking illustration of the relation of archæology to history. Archæology is not the handmaid of history; she occupies a far higher position than that: archæology is, as I said at the outset, the science of teaching history by its monuments. Now for all western and northern Europe nearly the whole of its early history must be deduced, so far as it can be deduced at all, from the monuments themselves ”

“ Greece and Rome; India, China, and Mexico; Denmark, Germany, Britain, and the other nations of modern Europe, all have their archæology. The field of inquiry,” he continues, “is boundless, and in the multitude of objects presenting themselves the enquirer is bewildered. It has been wisely provided therefore by the founder of this Professorship, 7that we shall direct our attention more immediately to one particular class of Antiquities, and that the noblest and most important of them all, I mean the Antiquities of Greece and Rome [2] .” ”

“ The British emperors or usurpers, Carausius and Allectus, have also left us very ample series of coins, and indeed it is by these, much more than by the monuments of letters, that their histories are known. In the fourth and fifth centuries the monetary art declined greatly in the Western Empire, and was on the whole at a very low ebb in the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, and in the middle ages, generally, throughout Europe.
At Constantinople a new school of Roman art arose, which exercised a powerful influence on medieval art in general. ”

“ The relation of archæology to Egyptian history deserves especial notice. We have not here, as in pre-historic Europe, a mere multitude of uninscribed and inconsiderable remains; but we have colossal monuments of all kinds—temples, gateways, obelisks, statues, rock sculptures—more or less over-written with hieroglyphics; also sepulchral-chambers, in many instances covered with paintings, in addition to a variety of smaller works, mummy cases, jewelry, scarabæi, pottery, &c., upon many of which are inscriptions. ”

“ Where Roman lamps were wont to glow. And of these lamps themselves we have an infinite number and variety, and on many of them representations of the games of the circus and of various other things, formed in relief; a remark which may also be made of their fine and valuable red Samian ware; fragments of which are commonly met with, but the vases are rarely entire. Of their other pottery, and of their glass and personal ornaments, and miscellaneous objects, I must hardly say any thing; but only observe that the Romans have left us a very interesting series of coins relating to Britain ”

“ But the very masters who raised the art to its perfection brought about its destruction. Painting, restored by these same great men, was too powerful a rival; and after the sixteenth century, when it still flourished in Venice under the encouragement of Titian, we hear little more of mosaics on any great scale. ”

“ But besides a knowledge of facts, and objects, and books, there are one or two other qualifications necessary for many departments of archæology, the want of which has been very prejudicial to 65some distinguished writers. Exact scholarship is one of these qualifications. I do not merely mean that if a man be engaged in Greek archæology, he must be aware of the passages of Greek authors, in which the vases or the coins he is talking about are alluded to, though he must certainly be acquainted with these, and possess sufficient scholarship to construe them correctly ”

“ And we may well conceive that nothing less than its destruction would effectually convince the world of the great truth that an hour had arrived in which neither that holy mountain on which it was built, nor any other in the whole world, was to be the scene of the exclusive worship of the Father. The sites of the Holy Places, however, have naturally excited much attention, and have been well illustrated by several distinguished resident members of our University, and also by a foreign gentleman who for some time resided among us. ”

“ Occasionally (it is true) this is the case with coins; but with gems it is the rule. Of course, to speak generally, the art of gems, whose material is always more or less precious, is superior to that of coins, which were often carelessly executed, as being merely designed for a medium of commercial exchange. High art would not usually spend itself upon small copper money, but be reserved for the more valuable pieces, especially those of gold and silver [16] . ”

“ The order and sequence of the stone, bronze, and iron ages, were distinctly made out; and even their chronology may one day be discovered. The antiquary is enabled to form some judgment of the civilisation, the arts, and the religion of the nations whose remains he studies. Very often, as in the Roman series of coins, he makes out political events in their history, and assigns their dates. He determines the place of things in the historical series, much as the naturalist does in the natural series.
Like the naturalist also he must be a man of learning, i.e. ”

“ Some distinguished antiquaries consider that they are the earliest human remains in Western Europe. Various other discoveries in the same regions of late years have tended towards shewing that the time during 16which man has lived upon the earth is much greater than we had commonly supposed. The geological and archæological circumstances under which the flint implements were found at Abbeville, and St Acheul, near Amiens, in the valley of the Somme, left no doubt that they were anterior by many ages to the Roman Empire. ”

“ In the fourteenth century, when examples become common, the glass-painters copied nature with more fidelity, and exchanged the violet-tinted masses, by which the flesh-tints had been rendered, for a reddish gray colour, painted upon white glass, which approached more nearly to nature. ”

“ The subjects of gems are mostly mythological, or are connected with the heroic cycle; a smaller, but more interesting 40number, presents us with portraits, which however are in general uninscribed. At the same time, by comparing these with portrait-statues and coins we are able to identify Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Alexander the Great, several of the Ptolemies, and a few others; most of which may have been engraved by Greco-Roman artists. But the catalogue of authentic portraits preserved to us, both Greek and Roman, is, as K. O. Müller observes, now very much to be thinned. ”

“ The British barrows of various forms and other sepulchral remains may also be referred, I should conceive, in part at least, to the pre-Roman Celtic period. The earlier mounds contain weapons and ornaments of stone, bronze and ivory, and rude pottery; the later ones, called Roman British barrows, appear mostly not to contain stone implements, but various articles of bronze and iron and pottery; also gold ornaments and amber and bead necklaces. Other sepulchral monuments consist merely of heaps of stones covering the body which has been laid in the earth. ”

“ My learned predecessor well says that “this question is sometimes put to the lover of science or letters by those from whom nature has withheld the faculty of deriving pleasure from the exercise of the intellect, and he feels for the moment degraded to the level of such.” It is not so clear however that the fault must be put to the account of nature. ”