face to face, if not with the personal heroes of Homer, at least with the men of that age of Hellenic culture which the songs of Homer set before us. The buildings of Mykênê have been described over and over again till their general effect must be almost as familiar to those who have not seen them as to those who have. But here, as everywhere else, it is the merely artistic character which can be thus taken at a distance. To feel Mykênê, as to feel any other place, we must see it. And even some of the artistic points can, as usual, be thoroughly made out only on the spot. One must see the place thoroughly to take in the wide difference between the masonry and artistic finish of the lion-gate and of the two chief treasuries. The lion-gate--we mean the gate itself, as distinguished from the lions--is a mere piling together of stones. The work is done doubtless with great mechanical skill, and it has the wonderful effect which all such primitive buildings have; still it is altogether without any claims on the score of art. But in the gateways of the treasuries, instead of the vast erect jambs of the lion-gate, we find well-wrought courses of stone in two orders, with something that may almost be called a moulding. These gateways had columns too. Unluckily nearly all are gone, even the precious fragment which was seen and drawn by the earlier travellers. This last, be it remembered, was of a kind which would not have looked out of place in any Romanesque building in England or Normandy. This is a most instructive fact, as the likeness must have been purely accidental; and this may serve to remind us that there are such things as accidental likenesses, and to warn us against leaping to conclusions when such likenesses are found in times and places far distant from one another. In the second treasury, the one lately brought to light by Dr. Schliemann, there is a fragment of another column, no longer in its place, which looks like the first rude attempt at the later Doric. Now over both these gateways, and also over the lion-gate, are openings of the same triangular form, though of course wrought far more carefully in the treasuries than in the lion-gate. In the treasuries these openings are openings; they are at present filled up with nothing. That over the lion-gate is filled, as all the world knows, with a basaltic stone which would seem more natural at Bamburgh than at Mykênê, carved with the famous lions, if lions they be, which guard a column that would not seem out of place in the _duomo_ of Fiesole, in the apse of La Couture at Le Mans, or even in the slype at Worcester. Can we believe that the lion-gate and the lions, that the lion-gate and the gates of the treasuries, are all of the same date? And in point of work the lions at once connect themselves with the gateways of the treasuries, not with the gateway over which they stand. Surely we have in these gateways signs of an abiding type which lived on through several stages of advancing art.