CROSS LIGHTS. THE STUDY OF CLASSICAL THE extraordinary advance in popularity which the study of classical archæology has made in recent years, cannot fail to strike the most casual observer. When we see the Greek drama revived with as much accuracy as modern conditions will permit of, and that not merely at the Universities, the natural home of classical research, but in London itself, in the very height of the fashionable season; when we see meetings to promote the exploration of Asia Minor or the establishment of a School of Archæology at Athens attended by men of every position in life, not only artists, scholars and historians, but learned bishops, lawyers, and busy statesmen, and supported moreover by a public who fifty years ago would certainly have cared B for none of these things, the question may naturally occur, How is all this possible? What can men of the nineteenth century, busy men whose ordinary duties would seem enough in all conscience to occupy their attention-what can they find in the odds and ends of a civilization that has passed utterly away, to draw them even for a time from the pressing questions of to-day? It may, indeed, be safely said that there is no study of a purely academic interest,—none, that is to say, that is without any practical bearing on social or political problems of current importance— which possesses attractions for such different orders of mind, and can be pursued alongside vocations so various and so engrossing, as the study of classical archæology. What, then, is the reason? The answer to the question will perhaps become clearer on considering the change which has transformed the methods of archæologists since the days of Lessing and Winckelmann. It was in the time of these great writers that the classical ideal may be said to have been first formed, so far, at least, as Art is concerned; and it is, we think, to the modifications which that ideal has since undergone, that the present popularity of archæology will be found mainly to be due. |