l not have it that the men of old are dust: he
would bring them to him to share with him the sunlight which he finds so
precious. He is so much an enemy of Death and Decay that he would rob
them of their harvest; and, for every life the foe has claimed, he would
raise up, if he could, a memory that would continue to live.

The meaning of the heading which has been given to this chapter is now
becoming clear, and the direction of the argument is already apparent.
So far it has been my purpose to show that the archaeologist is not a
rag-and-bone man, though the public generally thinks he is, and he often
thinks he is himself. The attempt has been made to suggest that
archaeology ought not to consist in sitting in a charnel-house amongst
the dead, but rather in ignoring that place and taking the bones into
the light of day, decently clad in flesh and finery. It has now to be
shown in what manner this parading of the Past is needful to the gaiety
of the Present.

Amongst cultured people whose social position makes it difficult for
them to dance in circles on the grass in order to express or to
stimulate their gaiety, and whose school of deportment will not permit
them to sing a merry song of sixpence as they trip down the streets,
there is some danger of the fire of merriment dying for want of fuel.
Vivacity in printed books, therefore, has been encouraged, so that the
mind at least, if not the body, may skip about and clap its hands. A
portly gentleman with a solemn face, reading his 'Punch' in the club,
is, after all, giving play to precisely those same humours which in
ancient days might have led him, like Georgy Porgy, to kiss the girls or
to perform any other merry joke. It is necessary, therefore, ever to
enlarge the stock of things humorous, vivacious, or rousing, if thoughts
are to be kept young and eyes bright in this age of restraint. What
would Yuletide be without the olden times to bolster it? What would the
Christmas numbers do without the pictures of our great-grandparents'
coaches snow-bound, of huntsmen of the eighteenth century, of jesters at
the courts of the barons? What should we do without the 'Vicar of
Wakefield,' the 'Compleat Angler,' 'Pepys' Diary,' and all the rest of
the ancient books? And, going back a few centuries, what an amount we
should miss had we not 'AEsop's Fables,' the 'Odyssey,' the tales of the
Trojan War, and so on. It is from the archaeologist that one must expect
the augmentation