THE METHODS OF AECH^OLOGICAL RESEARCH. 591 



look for an adequate picture of the Jife lier citizens led and of the vast 

 colonial dependencies she controlled? We have a few busts 5 we have 

 a room devoted to the antiquities of Eoman Britain, and then we find 

 the mistress of many legions and the mother of us all treated every- 

 where as a sort of Cinderella to her more favored sister of Greece, a 

 mere outhouse and barn attached to a Greek palace. Our contention 

 is that there ought to be in our great museum, if not a special depart- 

 ment of Eoman antiquities, at least special room devoted to them worthy 

 of the fame of Eome and of its importance in human history. For many 

 of us who love art, but also love history, it is quite as important to 

 know what were the surroundings of Tiberius and of Marcus Aurelius 

 as of Pericles and Alexander the Great. What is true of the earlier 

 Eome is much more true of Byzantine Eome, the Eome of the Mosque 

 of St. Sophia, the Eome which inspired St. Mark's at Venice and the 

 glorious buildings at Eavenna and Si^oletro, which shook hands with 

 the East, and by this means wedded fresh ideas to those which were 

 becoming stagnant. Because Gibbon entitled his work the Decline 

 and Fall of the Eoman Empire, we have acquired an entirely mistaken 

 perspective in regard to the part played by Byzantium in the history 

 of art. Byzantium lived, thrived, and flourished for a thousand years 

 after the Goths had taken Eome. Nor are the code of Justinian, the 

 histories of Procopius and Constantine, and the magnificent buildings 

 dating- from this time and scattered all over the ^Fgean, signals of 

 decay and decrepitude, but the reverse; and yet where are we to look 

 for an adequate collection of objects to illustrate Byzantine art, its 

 rich barbaric sarcophagi, its enamels, silver plate, etc. 



My object in naming- these things is to point a moral. I am afraid 

 the old Adam, if he be not still among- us, has left his shadow behind, 

 and there remains much for the great and powerful society to urge and 

 to press. Archiieology is the study of history by its monuments, and 

 not a branch of aesthetics. Let us by all means guard our taste and 

 accumulate the highest and best, but let us also be eclectic and catholic, 

 and realize that the highest and best of all xihases of art are of supreme 

 value; and, further, that what we mean by history is not only the his- 

 tory of kings and armies, of great nobles, and great philosophers and 

 of the arts they patronized, but also that of the crowd, by whose con- 

 tinuous labor the world has been, and continues to be, subdued, and 

 whose homely and prosaic surroundings have a dramatic interest of 

 their own. If this be one great lesson which the wider horizon of 

 modern archaeological study has taught us, another and an equally 

 important one is that of the continuity of art. What Herbert Spencer 

 and Darwin have pressed upon the students of natural history, we anti- 

 quaries learned long before in regard to art, namely, that there are no 

 jerks and jumps in its history, but a continuous flow, and not only a 

 continuous flow, but something moi-e. It was formerly the notion that 

 when art took an apparently new departure, and became rejuvenated 



