106 A VERY OLD MASTEB 



A VERY OLD MASTER 



The work of art which lies before me is old, unquestionably 

 old ; a good deal older, in fact, than Archbishop Ussher 

 (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-rehef 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 respectable 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 primeval art was already hoary with the rime 

 of ages. When Memphian artists were busy in the morning 

 twilight of time with the towering coiffure of Ramses or 

 Sesostris, this far more ancient relic of plastic handicraft 

 was lying, already fossil and forgotten, beneath the con- 

 creted 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 Egyptian 

 onward, would fall into the tenth of the epochs thus 



