The Sun.
London, England, 1869-08-03 00:00:00

LORD LYTTON AND THE BRITISH
ARC'HEULOGICAL SOCIETY.

The 2Gth annual congress of this association was
opetiO yesterday at the Town-hall, St. Alban's,
when the inaugural address was delivered by the
President of the association, Lord Lytton.
The noble PRESIDENT in commencing his address,
after attributing mainly to the labours of the asso-
ciation the raising of arclzeJlogy from a graceful
accomplishment to the dignity of a philosophical
science, expressed his belief that his sole claim to
the position that he occupied lay in the fact he was
an inhabitant of the district visited by the associa-
tien, and that, while he did not pretend to rival
the learning of those he represented, he revered the
studies which they adorned, and was familar with
the localities whose monuments attracted their re-
searches. Re was proud to think that the county
in which they were then assembled was worthy of
the visitation from which its history and its monn •
ments would drive fresh illustrations and additional
interest. Camden, indeed, had said in his Britannia,
" for the renown of Antiquity Hertfordshire may
vie with any of its neigi)Lnur?, for scarce any other
county can show so many rems4ne." Arcl ae )logy
had been called the handmaid of history, and with-
out its aid history could as little repreeent the
particular time it endeavoured to recall as the
drawing of a skeleton would represent the features
and the form by which the individual human
being was recognised while in life. It was to the
skeleton of a former age that archaeology restored
the flesh, and the sinews, and the lineaments that
distinguished it from the countless centuries of
which it was a link, clothed it in the very gar-
ments that it wore, and rebuilt the very home in
which it dwelt. (Cheers.) But archaeology was
also the conservator of art. It disinterred from
neglected tombs the inventions of departed
genius, and bid them serve as studies, and
studies of inspiration, to the genius of a later
day. When the baths of Titus were excavated
at Rome, the attention of Raphael was di-
rected by a fellow artist to their faded ara-
besques ; those arabesques roused his own creative
imagination, and under his pencil reappeared on
the walls of the Vatican in new and original com-
binations of form and colour ; nay, that discovery,
and the train of ideas it aroused, might be said to
have suggested the delicate tracery and elaborate
ornaments of the new school of architecture, called
the Renaissance, out of which grew the palaces of
Fontainebleau and Ileidelberg, and which we had
naeuralised in England in those noble manorial resi-
deuces which adorned the reigns of Elizabeth and
James. But it was among the labours of the
archaeologist to guard from oblivion the myths, the
traditions, the legends of former days, and critical
and severe though his genius and its obligations
must be, still it was to his care that we owed the
preservation of many a pure and sacred well-spring
of poetry and romance, well springs from which
Spencer and Milton, Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth,
and Scott had drawn each his own special stream
of inspiration. (Cheers.) Last and not least of our
obligations to the spirit of archreslogy was, that it
stimulated and deepened in the heart of the people
sentiments of pride and affection for their native
land. In proportion as we cherished the memories
of our ancestors and revered the heirlooms they had
left us in monuments erected by their piety or bear-
ing witness of their lives and their deeds the soil on
which we trod became hallowed ground, and we felt
that patriotism was no idle name, but the main-
spring of every policy which made statesmen wise
and the borders of a State secure. (Cheers.) When
Gibbon gave us the mournful picture of Roman
corruption and decrepitude just before the final ex-
tinction of the Western Empire and the accession
of a barbarian King to the throne of the Caesars,
he told us that the monuments of Consular or Im-
perial greatness:were no longer revered as the im-
mortal glory of the capital, they were only esteemed
as an inexhaustible mine of materials cheaper and
more convenient than the distant quarry. And
with this miserable desecration of objects which
attested the majesty of Rome the very name of the
Roman passed away, and, to borrow the expression
of a French writer, " the descendants of Brutus be-
came the vassals of the Got')." Bat if the nati mal
spirit and love of country were thus generally
nourished by that seaic!iing and reverential study
of :the p: st which vas called archxelogy, there
was an inherent principle in the human mind
which made the affections more intense by limit-
ing their range. A man, for instance, might take
but a lukewarm interest in the antiquities of the
whole British Empire compared to that which
he might readily be indaced to take in the anti-
quities of the county to which he belonged.
"Things distant," said an old writer, " affect us
feebly ; things which are brought under our eyes
rouse our emotions and appeal to our hearts." For
that reason he thought that the Archanlogical As-
sociation had done most wisely in holding its an-
nual congresses at successive divisions of oer com-
mon country, becauseby so doing they sowed in one
place the seeds of patriotism and of art, which were
wafted to other places more remote, till the same
culture of ideas which had commenced at a county
town gradually embraced the surface of the king-
dom. And in that county and at St. Alban's the
association would find memorials and reminiscences
that illustrated the history of our native island from
its earliest date ; from the ancient Briton, whose
ancestors, if Welsh traditionwere true, crossed what
was called in that language " the hazy sea," from
the land of the Crimea, to the beloved and lamented
statesman who had a home at Brocket, and under
whose auspices was closed that last British war,
undertaken for the cause of European civilisation,
which had left the tombs of heroes on those Cri-
mean shores from which came the exiles that had
given to Scotland, Wales, and England the com-
mon name of Britain. (Cheers.) Round the spot,
too, on which they were assembled, one of the
bravest and the greatest of the British tribes held
dominion, far and near round that spot they trod
on ground which witnessed their dauntless and de-
spairing resistance to the Roman invader. And
here he might remark that the difference between
one race and another appeared to be according to
the mental organisation by which any given race
could receive ideas from a more civilised race by
which it was subdued or with which it was brought
into contact. If it could not receive and incorpo-
rate such ideas it withered and faded away, just as
the Red Indian withered and faded away beside the
superior civilisation of the American settlers. But
England never seemed, from the earliest historical
records, to be inhabited by any race which did not
accept ideas of improved civilisation from its visi-
tors or conquerors. The ancient Britons were not
ignorant barbarians, in our modern sense of the
word, at the time of the Roman conquest. Their
skill in agriculture was considerable, they had in
familiar use implements and machinery, such as
carriages, the watermill, and the windmill, which
attested their application of science to the arts of
husbandry. Bat from the Romans they received
the idea of facilities of transit and communica-
tion. The Romans were to the ancient world
what the railway companies were to the modern
—they were the great constructors of roads
and highways. Again, to the Romans, the Britons
owed the introduction of civil law, and the moment
the principle of secular justice between man and
man was familiarised to their minds the priestly
domination of the Druids, with all its sanguinary
superstitions, passed away. It was to Rowe, too,
that Britons owed that institutien of inunicif al
towns to which tie sophical statesman, M.
Guizot, traced the rise of niod,em fre dem in its
emancipation frem feudal opi r, scion and feudal
serfdom. When the Romans finally withdrew from
Britain 92 considerable towns had arisen, of which
33 cities possessed superior privileges. Among the
most famous of these cities was Verul: m, which
was a municipium in the thee of Nero, and the re-
mains of which were being more clearly brought to
light by the labourers of the Association, under the
skilful guidance of Mr. Edward Rob( rt s. The mem-
bers would on Wednesday be enabled, he belkved
to see at least the stage, the proscenium, and the
orchestra of the only Roman theatre yet found in
this country. Lastly, it was to the Roman con- I
queror that the Briton owed, if not the first partial
concession, at least the national recognition of that