Excerpt from A Glimpse Into the Past To be brought face to face with the heroes and monarchs of the ancient world, to see them in their habit as they lived, to know the countries over which they bore rule, the sports and. Pastimes with which they amused themselves and their subjects, the wars they prosecuted and the victories which they won, we have but to open a cabinet of ancient coins. In a moment we are in a fairy land. At will we can transport ourselves back almost to the first eras of human life at will we can raise before our eyes a vision of the past, the long-spent past of centuries buried in the dust of ages, but as vivid and as ineffaceable as though it were ofto-day. Coins and coinage betoken that the last steps have been taken by a com munityin its progress towards civilization. Rude indeed is the condition of a tribe whose daily wants are to be supplied by a barter of commodities. From actual value to a representation of value is a vast stride, only possible to a nation whose polished mind can evolve a life surrounded by art and its varied refinements. The currency of a people is the index of the degree of civiliza tion to which it has attained, and presents to us at one compre hensive View, in a manner more forcible than words could ever accomplish, the knowledge of its aesthetic perfection. Document ary evidence may be altered in a thousand ways; inscriptions may be added to and fabricated long after the period to which they apparently belong. Art is, however, always expressive of some contemporaneous idea, and conveys it unaltered to the latest times. No monarch, however absolute; can make the art of his time other than the expression of the feeling of that age; nor can he make it better than the advancement of his 'people at that time can afford. Art is therefore always an intelligible contemporary, one which. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.