By the foregoing detail I have sought to show that there is no preliminary bar to our entertaining the capital question whether the tombs now unearthed, and the remains exposed to view, under masks for the faces, and plates of gold covering one or more of the trunks, are the tombs and remains of the great Agamemnon and his compeers, who have enjoyed, through the agency of Homer, such a protracted longevity of renown. For the general character of the Mycenean treasures, I take my stand provisionally on the declaration of Mr. Newton (supported by Mr. Gardner), that, in his judgment, they belong to the prehistoric or heroic age, the age antecedent to his Greco-Phœnician period; and in important outlines of detail I have endeavoured to show that they have many points of contact with the Homeric Poems, and with the discoveries at Hissarlik. But this Preface makes no pretension whatever to exhibit a complete catalogue of the objects, or to supply for each of them its interpretation. We encounter, indeed, a certain number of puzzling phenomena, such as the appearance of something like visors, for which I could desire some other explanation, but which Schliemann cites as auxiliaries to the masks of the tombs, and even thinks to prove that such articles were used by the living, as well as for the dead (p. 359). Undoubtedly, in my view, these masks constitute a great difficulty, when we come to handle the question who were the occupants of the now opened sepulchres? It may be, that as Mr. Newton says, we must in the main rest content with the "reasonable presumption" that the four tombs contained Royal personages, and must leave in abeyance the further question, whether they are the tombs indicated to Pausanias by the local tradition; at any rate, until the ruins of Mycenæ shall have been further explored, according to the intention which the government of Greece is said to have conceived. At the same time this is a case where the question before us, if hazardous to prosecute, is not easy to let alone.