It is never safe to adopt in blind confidence the conclusions of the antiquary. He works with fragments; here it is a passage in an old deed; here a few lines of poetry; here a broken vase; here the capital of a column; here a drawing, cramped, and out of proportion, and dwarfed, from an illuminated manuscript. This kind of work tends to belittle everything; the splendid city becomes a mean, small town; King Solomon's Temple, glorious and vast, shrinks to the dimensions of a village conventicle; Behemoth himself becomes an alligator; Leviathan, a porpoise; history, read by this reducing lens, becomes a series of patriotic exaggerations. For instance, the late Dr. Brewer, a true antiquary, if ever there was one, could see in mediæval London nothing but a collection of mean and low tenements standing among squalid streets and filthy lanes. That this estimate of the City is wholly incorrect we shall now proceed to show. Any city, ancient or modern, might be described as consisting of mean and squalid houses, because in every city the poor outnumber the rich, and the small houses of the poor are more frequent than the mansions of the wealthy. [Illustration: CHARING CROSS _Erected by Edward I. in memory of Queen Eleanor of Castile_] When one who wishes to reconstruct a city of the past has obtained from the antiquary all he has discovered, and from the historian all he has to tell, there is yet another field of research open to him before he begins his task. It is the place itself--the _terrain_--the site of the town, or the modern town upon the site of the old. He must examine that; prowl about it; search into it; consider the neglected corners of it. I will give an example. Fifty years ago a certain learned antiquary and scholar visited the site of an ancient Syrian city, now sadly reduced, and little more than a village. He looked at the place--he did not explore it, he looked at it--he then read whatever history has found to say of it; he proceeded to prove that the place could never have been more than a small and insignificant town composed of huts and inhabited by fishermen. Those who spoke of it as a magnificent city he called enthusiasts or liars. Forty years passed; then another man came; he not only visited the site, but examined it, surveyed it, and explored it. This man discovered that the place had formerly possessed a wall--the remains still existing--two miles and more in length; an acropolis, strong and well situated--the ruins still standing--protecting a noble city with splendid buildings. The antiquary, you see, dealing with little fragments, could not rise above them; his fragments seemed to belong to a whole which was puny and insignificant. This antiquary was Dr. Robinson, and the place was the once famous city of Tiberias, by the shores of the Galilean lake.