us in
terra-cotta be of the fifth century B.C. or, quite the contrary, of the
nineteenth or twentieth century A.D.

Verily all "practised people" do not find "antiquities as readable as
print." On the other hand, my late friend, Dr. A. S. Murray, Keeper of
Classical Antiquities in the British Museum, "read" the Mycenaean
antiquities erroneously, placing them many centuries too late. M. de
Mortillet reckoned them forgeries, and wrote of the discoverer, Dr.
Schliemann, and even of Mrs. Schliemann, in a tone unusual in men of
science and gentlemen.

The great palaeolithic discoveries of M. Boucher de Perthes, the very
bases of our study of the most ancient men, were "read" as impostures by
many "practised people." M. Cartailhac, again, has lately, in the most
candid and honourable way, recanted his own original disbelief in certain
wall-paintings in Spanish caves, of the period called "palaeolithic," for
long suspected by him of being "clerical" impostures. {9}

Thus even the most "practised people," like General Councils, "may err
and have erred," when confronted either with forgeries, or with objects
old in fact, but new to them. They have _not_ always found antiquities
"as readable as print." Dr. Munro touches but faintly on these "follies
of the wise," but they are not unusual follies. This must never be
forgotten.

Where "practised people" may be mistaken through a too confirmed
scepticism, the "merely literary man" may, once in an azure moon, happen
to be right, or not demonstrably wrong; that is my excuse for differing,
provisionally, from "practised people." It is only provisionally that I
dissent from Dr. Munro as to some of the points at issue in the Clyde
controversy. I entered on it with very insufficient knowledge: I remain,
we all remain, imperfectly informed: and like people rich in
practice,--Dr. Joseph Anderson, and Sir Arthur Mitchell,--I "suspend my
judgement" for the present. {10}

This appears to me the most scientific attitude. Time is the great
revealer. But Dr. Munro, as we saw, prefers not to suspend his judgment,
and says plainly and pluckily that the disputed objects in the Clyde
controversy are "spurious"; are what the world calls "fakes," though from
a delicate sense of the proprieties of language, he will not call them
"forgeries." They are reckoned by him among "false antiquities," while,
for my part, I know not of what age they are, but incline I believe that
many of them ar