The Glory of the Pharaohs by Arthur Weigall

"Reason will tell you," wrote George Hakewill in 1627, "that old age or antiquity is to be accounted by the farther distance from the beginning and the nearer approach to the end, the times wherein we now live being in propriety of speech the most ancient since the world's creation. " The same thought was expressed by Giordano Bruno in 1564, and by Pascal in his _Treatise on Vacuum_. "For as old age," the latter writes, "is that period of life most remote from infancy, who does not see that old age in this universal man ought not to be sought in the times nearest his birth, but in those most remote from it? " "These present times," says Bacon, "are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient, _ordine_ retrogrado by a computation backward from ourselves."

It is curious to notice how completely we have all fallen into the error which these writers expose. We speak naturally of "the elder days," and we attribute to any period of the "olden times" an age which is in reality the sum of all the ages since. We seem to forget that antiquity, viewed as a period, is only old when we falsely add to it our own weight of years; and that antiquities, as objects, are only hoary when they have taken upon them the marks of their slow attainment, century by century, to the venerable age in which we now live. It is the Present that is old and hoary, not the Past. It is To-day that is burdened with the cares of advanced life; and, as compared with its heavy accountability, the bygone ages are light-hearted, irresponsible and unsubdued: for it is our own epoch, not theirs, that is encrusted with the corrosion of time.