A VERY OLD MASTER. 103 



bids them cling together for mutual support and sympathy, and as a 

 whole they have hardly the characteristics which would qualify them 

 for united constructive effort. Nevertheless, association is needed. A 

 comparison of views, each individual reaping the benefit of the 

 thought of his co-workers, is of the highest value. Without associated 

 action but little enthusiasm can be expected, and enthusiasm is all- 

 important in carrying forward any good work. The employment of 

 earnest and competent teachers and leaders in thought is practicable 

 only through united action. For charitable work the relief of want, 

 the alleviation of suffering, the furnishing of employment, the assist- 

 ance which helps others to help themselves associated and united 

 effort is well-nigh indispensable. And in earnest exertions to improve 

 the condition and add to the happiness of our fellows, may be found 

 the best and highest ethical culture, giving to those who engage in the 

 work a new conception as it were of the higher duties and nobler life 

 of man. 



--*- 



A VEEY OLD MASTER. 



THE work of art which lies before me is old, unquestionably old ; 

 a good deal older, in fact, than Archbishop Usher (who invented 

 all out of his own archiepiscopal head the date commonly assigned 

 for the creation of the world) would by any means have been ready to 

 admit. It is a bas-relief by an old master, considerably more antique 

 in origin than the most archaic gem or intaglio in the Museo Borbonico 

 at Naples, the mildly decorous Louvre in Paris, or the eminently re- 

 spectable British Museum, which is the glory of our own smoky London 

 in the spectacled eyes of German professors, all put together. When 

 Assyrian sculptors carved in fresh white alabaster the flowing curls of 

 Sennacherib's hair, just like a modern coachman's wig, this work of 

 primaeval art was already hoary with the rime of ages. When Mem- 

 phian artists were busy in the morning twilight of time with the 

 towering coiffure of Rameses or Sesostris, this far more ancient relic of 

 plastic handicraft was lying, already fossil and forgotten, beneath the 

 concreted floor of a cave in the Dordogne. If we were to divide the 

 period for which we possess authentic records of man's abode upon 

 this oblate spheroid into ten epochs an epoch being a good, high- 

 sounding word which doesn't commit one to any definite chronology 

 in particular then it is probable that all known art, from the Egyp- 

 tian onward, would fall into the tenth of the epochs thus loosely de- 

 markated, while my old French bas-relief would fall into the first. To 

 put the date quite succinctly, I should say it was most likely about 

 244,000 years before the creation of Adam according to Usher. 



The work of the old master is lightly incised on reindeer-horn, 

 and represents two horses, of a very early and heavy type, following 



