A VERY OLD MASTER 121 



hard to realise them !) upon his maturer shoulders. Then 

 comes the age of what older antiquaries used to regard 

 as primitive antiquity the age of the English barrows, of 

 the Danish kitchen middens, of the Swiss lake dwellings. 

 The men who lived in it had domesticated the dog, the cow, 

 the sheep, the goat, and the invaluable pig ; they had begun 

 to sow small ancestral wheat and undeveloped barley ; 

 they had learnt to weave flax and wear decent clothing : 

 in a word, they had passed from the savage hunting condi- 

 tion to the stage of barbaric herdsmen and agriculturists. 

 That is a comparatively modern period, and yet I suppose 

 we must conclude with Dr. James Geikie that it isn 't to be 

 measured by mere calculations of ten or twenty centuries, 

 but of ten or twenty thousand years. The perspective of 

 the past is opening up rapidly before us ; what looked quite 

 close yesterday is shown to-day to lie away off somewhere 

 in the dim distance. Like our palaeolithic artists, we fail 

 to get the reindeer fairly behind the ox in the foreground, 

 as we ought to do if we saw the whole scene properly fore- 

 shortened. 



On the table where I write there He two paper-weights, 

 preserving from the fate of the sibylline leaves the sheets of 

 foolscap to which this essay is now being committed. 

 One of them is a very rude flint hatchet, produced by 

 merely chipping off flakes from its side by dexterous blows, 

 and utterly unpolished or unground in any way. It belongs 

 to the age of the very old master (or possibly even to a 

 slightly earlier epoch), and it was sent me from Ightham, 

 in Kent, by that indefatigable unearther of prehistoric 

 memorials, Mr. Benjamin Harrison. That flint, which now 

 serves me in the office of a paper-weight, is far ruder, 

 simpler, and more ineffective than any weapon or imple- 

 ment at present in use among the lowest savages. Yet with 

 it, I doubt not, some naked black fellow by the banks of 



