120 A VERY OLD MASTER 



the intervention of a vast blank space, the space occupied 

 by the coming on and passing away of the Glacial Epoch. 

 A great gap cuts him off from what we may consider as the 

 relatively modern age of the mound-buildors, whose grassy 

 barrows still cap the summits of our southern chalk downs. 

 When the great ice sheet drove away palfeolithic man — the 

 man of the caves and the unwrouglit flint axes — from 

 Northern Europe, he was still nothing more than a naked 

 savage in the hunting stage, divinely gifted for art, indeed, 

 but armed only with roughly chipped stone implements, 

 and wholly ignorant of taming animals or of the very 

 rudiments of agriculture. He knew nothing of the use of 

 metals — aiiruin irrcpertum cpernere fortior — and he had 

 not even learnt how to grind and polish his rude stone 

 tomahawks to a finished edge. He couldn't make himself 

 a bowl of sun-baked pottery, and, if he had discovered the 

 almost universal art of manufacturing an intoxicating liquor 

 from grain or berries (for, as Byron, with too great anthropo- 

 logical truth, justly remarks, * man, being reasonable, must 

 get drunk '), he at least drank his aboriginal beer or toddy 

 from the capacious horn of a slaughtered aurochs. That 

 was the kind of human being who alone inhabited France 

 and England during the later pre-Glacial period. 



A hundred and seventy thousand years elapse (as the 

 play-bills put it), and then the curtain rises afresh upon 

 neolithic Europe. Man meanwhile, loitering somewhere 

 behind the scenes in Asia or Africa (as yet imperfectly ex- 

 plored from this point of view), had acquired the important 

 arts of sharpening his tomahawks and producing hand- 

 made pottery for his kitchen utensils. When the great ice 

 sheet cleared away he followed the returning summer into 

 Northern Europe, another man, physically, intellectually, 

 and morally, with all the slow accumulations of nearly two 

 thousand centuries (how easily one writes the words ! how 



