a necessary part of the equipment of an antiquary. The whole tribe of antiquaries suffers under the false imputation that their work is ‘dry-as-dust.’ No doubt there are minute, exact, and arid minds in that, as in other callings. No doubt there is useful work to be done, here as elsewhere, by men who ply a dull mechanical trade and forswear imagination. But imaginative sympathy is, none the less, the soul of an antiquary, the impulse that urges him on to years of tedious labour, and the refreshment that keeps him alive in a desert of dust and tombs. ‘Methinks,’ says Aubrey, ‘I am carried on by a kind of Oestrum, for nobody else hereabout hardly cares for it, but rather makes a scorn of it. But methinks it shews a kind of gratitude and good nature, to revive the memories and memorials of the pious and charitable Benefactors long since dead and gone.’ But if gratitude is the prevailing motive, it is by a wide faculty of imagination that the antiquary comes to understand that there is but one human society on earth, and that, for good or for evil, the living are the least part of it. When other men see only a wave of green rising ground, he calls up in his thought a bygone civilization, he sees the Roman soldiers relieving guard and exchanging gossip on the ramparts of a world-empire, he witnesses excursions and alarums, and hears the strange jargon of the long-haired prisoners brought captive into camp. Where others see only a scrap of brown parchment inscribed with unintelligible characters he reconstructs in thought the mediaeval church and the despotism that it wielded in all the dearest relations of life. He knows that a great institution never perished without leaving a legacy to those that come after it, and that the present is inextricably entangled with the past.
