your ardour for studying what is really one of the most interesting of all histories, should have been cooled by the difficulties you met with on first setting
I confess that, before I had been in Egypt, I thought Egyptian History quite as dull as you do now. I used to wonder how people could admire the great thicklipped statues in the British Museum, and what pleasure they could take in examining the odd dog-headed vases, and stiff little blue gods, which to me all looked so exactly like one to another. Even when I was introduced to that oldest mummy-case, whose inhabitant lived probably some hundred years before Abraham, I did not feel as much enthusiasm as I knew I ought to feel. It was not to me so really venerable as Mary Queen of Scots' signet-ring, and it did not call up half such interesting associations as Magna Charta did.
Now that I have seen the grand old temples, and wonderful tombs from which these relics were taken, I cannot describe to you how different they look to The hieroglyphic names on the tablets and the statues are no longer mere hard words to me, they call up the remembrance of persons and places, and serve as a link to carry me back in thought to the far, far off ages which I can now feel really were; when mankind and the world were young,-when poetry, art, science, government, and languages were beginning to be.
That we should have the opportunity of tracing these in their infancy; that the history of the old time should have been preserved for us, and that men of our day should have overcome the almost insurmountable difficulties that lay in the way of opening it out for us,