Death, as we watch it around us, is the black menace of the heavens which darkens every man’s day; Death, coming to our neighbour, puts a period to our merrymaking; Death, seen close beside us, calls a halt in our march of pleasure. But let those who would wrest her victory from the grave turn to a study of the Past, where all is dead yet still lives, and they will find that the horror of life’s cessation is materially lessened. To those who are familiar with the course of history, Death seems, to some extent, but the happy solution of the dilemma of life. So many men have welcomed its coming that one begins to feel that it cannot be so very terrible. Of the death of a certain Pharaoh an ancient Egyptian wrote: “He goes to heaven like the hawks, and his feathers are like those of the geese; he rushes at heaven like a crane, he kisses heaven like the falcon, he leaps to heaven like the locust”; and we who read his words can feel that to rush eagerly at heaven like the crane would be a very fine ending of the story. Archæology, and especially Egyptology, in this respect is a bulwark to those who find the faith of their fathers wavering; for, after much study, the triumphant assertion which is so often found in Egyptian tombs--“Thou dost not come dead to thy sepulchre, thou comest living”--begins to take hold of the imagination. Death has been the parent of so much goodness, dying men have cut such a dash, that one looks at it with an awakening interest. Even if the sense of the misfortune of death is uppermost in an archæologist’s mind, he may find not a little comfort in having before him the example of so many good men, who, in their hour, have faced that great calamity with squared shoulders. “When Death comes,” says a certain sage of ancient Egypt, “it seizes the babe that is on the breast of its mother as well as him that has become an old man. When thy messenger comes to carry thee away, be thou found by him _ready_.” Why, here is our chance; here is the opportunity for that flourish which modesty, throughout our life, has forbidden to us! John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, when the time came for him to lay his head upon the block, bade the executioner to smite it off with three strokes as a courtesy to the Holy Trinity. King Charles the Second, as he lay upon his death-bed, apologised to those who stood around him for “being such an unconscionable time adying.” The story is familiar of Napoleon’s aide-de-camp, who, when he had been asked whether he were wounded, replied, “Not wounded, killed,” and thereupon expired. The Past is full of such incidents; and so inspiring are they that Death comes to be regarded as a most stirring adventure. The archæologist, too, better than any other, knows the vastness of the dead men’s majority; and, if, like the ancients, he believe in the Elysian fields, where no death is and decay is unknown, he alone will realise the excellent nature of the company into which he will there be introduced.