PHILLIPS 
 The Lost Arts. 
 
 T 
 33 
 
 P5
 
 Sold for the Benefit of the Memorial Fund. 
 Price, 25 cents. 
 
 THE LOST ARTS 
 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 WENDELL PHILLIPS HALL ASSOCIATION 
 
 8ie WASHINGTON STREET 
 
 1892
 
 The People's Tribute to a Great Man* 
 
 The Wendell Phillips Hall Association is incorporated for 
 the pin-pose of erecting a Memorial Building in commemmoration 
 of the life and public services of Wendell Phillips. (Jen. I>. F. 
 Butler is President, and ex-(Jov. Brackett, Treasurer, with u 
 representative and efficient Board of Directors. 
 
 The building is- to be centrally located and contain a large 
 hall and several smaller audience, committee and class rooms, 
 constituting essentially a "Cooper I'nion" for Boston, with memo- 
 rial features, which Avill make it stand to the period it commemo- 
 rates as Pilgrim Hall and Forefathers' Monument to the settlement 
 of Plvmouth, or as Bunker Hill Monument, the old South Church 
 and Faneuil Hall to the Revolutionary era. 
 
 In appropriate portions of the building will be stained glas- 
 windows, paintings and bas-reliefs portraying the most thrilling 
 -.-pisodes in Phillips' life, including his famous Faneuil Hall 
 -pi -ecli ; also, scenes from the lives of Wm. Lloyd Garrison. 
 Charles Sunnier, John Brown and others, from the shooting of 
 Lovejoy, at Alton, 111., to the signing of the Emancipation 
 Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln. There will be a museum 
 for the preservation of souvenirs, letters and documents pertain- 
 ing to the period. 
 
 A lectureship resembling those of the Lowell Institute, and 
 rla-ses for social, economic and industrial training, are to be 
 established in connection with the hall, the idea being that too 
 much cannot be done to promote good citizenship and permanence 
 of government. There will also be a well equipped reading- 
 room and library. 
 
 Believing tlmt ///n/n/ it-it! <-sfi'tin it a prici'lcyc to contril-nt<- 
 tomething in ni<J <>f tin- m<>ih-l nu'inorinl ami ri'i'urni institution of 
 . tins i-in-iilnr I, tt,-r As i*siti-il earnestly inciting you to do 
 irliut if 1 1 u. cnn in jinnnntc this icnrtlti/ and great undertaking.
 
 UCSB LIBRARY 
 
 THE LOST ARTS 
 
 BY 
 
 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 BOSTON 
 WENDELL PHILLIPS HALL ASSOCIATION 
 
 812 WASHINGTON STREET 
 1892
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1884, 
 BY LEE AND SHEPARD. 
 
 All rights reserved.
 
 PREFACE TO "THE LOST ARTS." 
 
 IN 1830 the lyceum lecture-system, which has played so 
 important and conspicuous a part in the political and 
 intellectual education of the masses, was started by Horace 
 Mann, Josiah Holbrook, Rev. Dr. Allen, Hon. Amasa 
 Walker, George B. Emerson, and others. Mr. Phillips was 
 one of the first to take part in the movement ; and, as early 
 as 1836, he delivered his first lecture. His subjects were 
 almost invariably chosen from the realm of natural science, 
 of which he was always more fond than of the law ; and 
 every succeeding winter his name appears as one of the 
 lecturers in the stated courses of the day. 
 
 The lecture on "The Lost Arts," which has been conceded 
 to be the most popular and the most charming lecture for the 
 people ever delivered from an American platform, began its 
 career in the winter of 1838-39. Previous to this time Mr. 
 Phillips had spoken chiefly on themes pertaining to chem- 
 istry and natural physics, and occasionally on some of the 
 discoveries and inventions in the field of mechanics. Being 
 called upon rather suddenly to speak before a certain audi- 
 ence, it occurred to him that a familiar r&sum& of curious 
 knowledge about the arts, which the ancients knew, and 
 which we can neither rival nor revive, might possibly prove 
 entertaining. Although hastily outlined in a series of notes,
 
 4 PREFACE. 
 
 it made an immense hit. It was ^almost an impromptu 
 delivery : at the time, it was not committed to writing, and, 
 indeed, was never written out by Mr. Phillips during his life- 
 time. What is even more strange, "The Lost Arts" was 
 rarely, if ever, delivered twice alike, although delivered 
 nearly two thousand times. 
 
 About twenty years ago Mr. Phillips was engaged to 
 deliver the lecture in the " Redpath Lyceum." A stenog- 
 rapher was employed to make a verbatim report : it was 
 carefully written out in full, was elegantly bound, and then 
 presented to its author. Mr. Phillips expressed himself 
 exceedingly grateful to his friends, but was much overcome 
 by the reply, 
 
 " We have not done it for your sake, Mr. Phillips, but 
 for posterity."
 
 THE LOST ARTS. 
 
 LADIES AND GENTLEMEN : 
 
 I AM to talk to you to-night about "The Lost Arts," 
 a lecture which has grown under my hand year 
 after year, and which belongs to that first phase of the 
 lyceum system, before it undertook to meddle with politi- 
 cal duties or dangerous and angry questions of ethics ; 
 when it was merely an academic institution, trying to 
 win busy men back to books, teaching a little science, 
 or repeating some tale of foreign travel, or painting 
 some great representative character, the symbol of his 
 age. I think I can claim a purpose be}'ond a moment's 
 amusement in this glance at early civilization. 
 
 I, perhaps, might venture to claim that it was a 
 medicine for what is the most objectionable feature of 
 our national character; and that is self-conceit, an un- 
 due appreciation of ourselves, an exaggerated estimate 
 of our achievements, of our inventions, of our contribu- 
 Uons to popular comfort, and of our place, in fact, in 
 the great procession of the ages. We seem to imagine, 
 that whether knowledge will die with us, or not, it 
 certainly began with us. We have a pit^ving estimate, 
 a tender pity, for the narrowness, ignorance, and dark- 
 ness of the b^vgone ages. We seem to ourselves not 
 only to monopolize, but to have begun, the era of light. 
 In other words, we are all winning over with a fourth- 
 
 5
 
 6 THE LOST ARTS. 
 
 day-of-July spirit of self-content. I am often reminded 
 of the German whom the English poet Coleridge met 
 at Frankfort. He always took off his hat with pro- 
 found respect when he ventured to speak of himself. 
 It seems to me, the American people might be painted 
 in the chronic attitude of taking off its hat to itself; 
 and therefore it can be no waste of time, with an audi- 
 ence in such a mood, to take their eyes for a moment 
 from the present civilization, and guide them back to 
 that earliest possible era that history describes for us, 
 if it were only for the purpose of asking whether we 
 boast on the right line. I might despair of curing us 
 of the habit of boasting, but I might direct it better ! 
 
 Well, I have been somewhat criticised, year after 
 year, for this endeavor to open up the claims of old 
 times. I have been charged with repeating useless 
 fables with no foundation. To-day I take the mere 
 subject of glass. This material, Pliny says, was discov- 
 ered by accident. Some sailors, landing on the eastern 
 coast of Spain, took their cooking-utensils, and sup- 
 ported them on the sand by the stones that they found 
 in the neighborhood : they kindled their fire, cooked 
 the fish, finished the meal, and removed the apparatus; 
 and glass was found to have resulted from the nitre and 
 sea-sand, vitrified by the heat. Well, I have been a 
 dozen times criticised by a number of wise men, in 
 newspapers, who have said that this was a very idle 
 tale, that there never was sufficient heat in a few bun- 
 bles of sticks to produce vitrification, glass-making. 
 I happened, two years ago, to meet, on the prairies of 
 Missouri, Professor Shepherd, who started from Yale 
 College, and, like a genuine Yankee, brings up any- 
 where where there is any thing to do. I happened to 
 mention this criticism to him. "Well," says he, "a 
 little practical life would have freed men from that
 
 THE LOST ARTS. 7 
 
 doubt/' Said lie, " We stopped last year in Mexico, to 
 cook some venison. We got down from our saddles, 
 and put the cooking-apparatus on stones we found 
 there ; made our fire with the wood we got there, re- 
 sembling ebony ; and when we removed the apparatus 
 there was pure silver gotten out of the embers by the 
 intense heat of that almost iron wood. Now," said he, 
 " that heat was greater than any necessary to vitrify the 
 materials of glass." Why not suppose that Pliny's 
 sailors had lighted on some exceedingly hard wood? 
 May it not be as possible as in this case ? 
 
 So, ladies and gentlemen, with a growing habit of 
 distrust of a large share of this modern and exceedingly 
 scientific criticism of ancient records, I think we have 
 been betraying our own ignorance, and that frequently, 
 when the statement does not look, on the face of it, to 
 be exactly accurate, a little investigation below the sur- 
 face will show that it rests on a real truth. Take, for 
 instance, the English proverb, which was often quoted 
 in my college days. We used to think how little logic 
 the common people had ; and when we wanted to illus- 
 trate this in the schoolroom, it was what was called a 
 non scquitur : the effect did not come from the cause 
 named, we always quoted the English proverb, "Ten- 
 terden steeple is the cause of Goodwin Sands." We 
 said, " How ignorant a population ! " But, when we 
 went deeper into the history, we found that the proverb 
 was not meant for logic, but was meant for sarcasm. 
 One of the bishops had fifty thousand pounds given to 
 him, to build a breakwater to save the Goodwin Sands 
 from the advancing sea ; but the good bishop, being 
 one of the kind of bishops which Mr. Froude describes 
 in his lecture, that the world would be better if Provi- 
 dence would remove them from it, instead of build- 
 ing the breakwater to keep out the sea, simply built a
 
 8 THE LOT ARTS. 
 
 steeple ; anr< this proverb was sarcastic, and not logical, 
 that Tenterden steeple was the cause of the Goodwin 
 Sands." When you contemplate the motive, there was 
 the closest and best-welded logic in the proverb. So 
 I think a large share of our criticism of old legends 
 and old statements will be found in the end to be the 
 ignorance that overleaps its own saddle, and falls on 
 the other side. 
 
 Well, my first illustration ought to be this material, 
 glass: but, before I proceed to talk of these lost arts, 
 I ought in fairness to make an exception ; and it is the 
 conception and conceit which lies here. Over a very 
 large section of literature, there is a singular contradic- 
 tion to this swelling conceit. There are certain lines 
 in which the moderns are ill satisfied with themselves, 
 and contented to acknowledge that they ought fairly to 
 sit down at the feet of their predecessors. Take poetry, 
 painting, sculpture, architecture, the drama, and almost 
 every thing in works of any form that relates to beauty, 
 with regard to that whole sweep, the modern world 
 gilds it with its admiration of the beautiful. Take the 
 very phrases that we use. The artist says he wishes to 
 go to Rome. " For what ? " " To study the masters." 
 Well, all the masters have been in their graves several 
 hundred years. We are all pupils. You tell the poet, 
 " Sir, that line of yours would remind one of Homer," 
 and he is crazy. Stand in front of a painting, in the 
 hearing of the artist, and compare its coloring to that 
 of Titian or Raphael, arid he remembers you forever. 
 I remember once standing in front of a bit of marble 
 carved by Powers, a Vermonter, who had a matchless, 
 instinctive love of art, and perception of beauty. I said 
 to an Italian standing with me, " Well, now, that seems 
 to me to be perfection." The answer was, "To be 
 perfection," shrugging his shoulders, " why, sir,
 
 THE LOST ARTS. 
 
 that reminds you of Phidias ! " as if to remind you 
 of that Greek was a greater compliment than to be 
 perfection. 
 
 Well, now the very choice of phrases betrays a con- 
 fession of inferiority, and you see it again creeps out in 
 the amount we borrow. Take the whole range of im- 
 aginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. 
 In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or 
 beauty, or form, we are borrowers. 
 
 You may glance around the furniture of the palaces 
 in Europe, and you may gather all these utensils of art 
 or use ; and, when you have fixed the shape and forms 
 in your mind, I will take you into the museum of 
 Naples, which gathers all remains of the domestic life 
 of the Romans, and you shall not find a single one of 
 these modern forms of art or beauty or use, that was 
 not anticipated there. We have hardly added *one 
 single line or sweep of beauty to the antique. 
 
 Take the stories of Shakspeare, who has, perhaps, 
 written his forty-odd plays. Some are historical. The 
 rest, two-thirds of them, he did not stop to invent, but 
 he found them. These he clutched, ready made to his 
 hand, from the Italian novelists, who had taken them 
 before from the East. Cinderella and her slipper is 
 older than all history, like half a dozen other baby 
 legends. The annals of the world do not go back far 
 enough to tell us from where they first came. 
 
 All the boys' plays, like every thing that amuses the 
 child in the open air, are Asiatic. Rawlinson will show 
 you that they came somewhere from the banks of the 
 Ganges or the suburbs of Damascus. Bulwer bor- 
 rowed the incidents of his Roman stories from legends 
 uf a thousand years before. Indeed, Dunlop, who has 
 grouped the history of the novels of all Europe into 
 one essay, says that in the nations of modern Europe
 
 10 THE LOST ARTS. 
 
 there have been two hundred and fifty or three hundred 
 distinct stories. He says at least two hundred of these 
 may be traced, before Christianity, to the other side of 
 the Black Sea. If this were my topic, which it is not, I 
 might tell you that even our newspaper-jokes are enjoy- 
 ing a very respectable old age. Take Maria Edgeworth's 
 essay on Irish bulls and the laughable mistakes of the 
 Irish. Even the tale which either Maria Edgeworth or 
 her father thought the best is that famous story of a 
 man writing a letter as follows : " My dear friend, I 
 would write you in detail, more minutely, if there was 
 rot an impudent fellow looking over my shoulder, read- 
 ing even' word." ("No, you lie: I've not read a word 
 you have written ! ") This is an Irish bull, still it is a 
 very old one. It is only two hundred and fifty years 
 older than the New Testament. Horace Walpole dis- 
 sented froni Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and thought the 
 other Irish bull was the best, of the man who said, "I 
 would have been a very handsome man, but they changed 
 me in the cradle." That comes from Don Quixote, and 
 is Spanish; but Cervantes borrowed it from the Greek 
 in the fourth century, and the Greek stole it from the 
 Egyptian hundreds of years back. 
 
 There is one story which it is said Washington has 
 related, of a man who went into an inn, and asked for a 
 glass of drink from the landlord, who pushed forward 
 a wineglass about half the usual size ; the tea-cups also 
 in that day were not more than half the present size. 
 The landlord said, " That glass out of which you are 
 drinking is forty years old." "Well," said the thirsty 
 traveller, contemplating its diminutive proportions, " I 
 think it is the smallest thing of its age I ever saw." 
 That story as told is given as a story of Athens three 
 hundred and seventy-five years before Christ was born. 
 Why! all these Irish bulls are Greek, everyone of
 
 THE LOST ARTS. 11 
 
 them. Take the Irishman who carried around a brick 
 as a specimen of the house he had to sell ; take the Irish- 
 man who shut his eyes, and looked into the glass to see 
 how he would look when he was dead ; take the Irish- 
 man that bought a crow, alleging that crows were report- 
 ed to live two hundred years, and he meant to set out 
 and try it ; take the Irishman who met a frignd who 
 said to him,' "Why, sir, I heard you were dead." 
 " Well," says the man, " I suppose you see I'm not." 
 " Oh, no ! " says he, " I would believe the man who told 
 me a good deal quicker than I would you." Well, those 
 are all Greek. A score or more of them, of the parallel 
 character, come from Athens. 
 
 Our old Boston patriots felt that tarring and feather- 
 ing a Tory was a genuine patent Yankee fire-brand,* 
 Yankeeism. They little imagined that when Richard 
 Cceur de Lion set out on one of his crusades, among 
 the orders he issued to his camp of soldiers was, that 
 any one who robbed a hen-roost should be tarred and 
 feathered. Many a man who lived in Connecticut has 
 repeated the story of taking children to the limits of 
 the town, and giving them a sound thrashing to enforce 
 their memory of the spot. But the Burgundians in 
 France, in a law now eleven hundred years old, attrib- 
 uted valor to the East of France because it had a law 
 that the children should be taken to the limits of the 
 district, and there soundly whipped, in order that they 
 might forever remember where the limits came. 
 
 So we have very few new things in that line. But I 
 said I would take the subject, for instance, of this very 
 material very substance glass. It is the very best 
 expression of man's self-conceit. 
 
 I had heard that nothing had been observed in ancient 
 times which could be called by the name of glass. 
 that there had been merely attempts to imitate it. I
 
 12 THE LOST ARTG. 
 
 thought they had proved the proposition : they certainly 
 had elaborated it. In Pompeii, a dozen miles south of 
 Naples, which was covered with ashes by Vesuvius eigh- 
 teen hundred years ago, they broke into a room full of 
 glass: there was ground-glass, window-glass, cut-glass, 
 and colored glass of every variety. It was undoubtedly 
 a glass-maker's factory. So the lie and the refutation 
 came face to face. It was like a pamphlet printed in 
 London, in 1836, by Dr. Lardner, which proved that a 
 steamboat could not cross the ocean ; and the book came 
 to this country in the first steamboat that came across 
 the Atlantic. 
 
 The chemistry of the most ancient period had reached 
 a point which we have never even approached, and which 
 we in vain struggle to reach to-day. Indeed, the whole 
 management of the effect of light on glass is still a 
 matter of profound study. The first two stories which 
 I have to offer you are simply stories from history. 
 
 The first is from the letters of the Catholic priests 
 who broke into China, which were published in France 
 some two hundred years ago. Tjiey were shown a glass, 
 transparent and colorless, which was filled with a liquor 
 made by the Chinese, that was shown to the observers, 
 and appeared to be colorless like water. This liquor 
 was poured into the glass, and then, looking through it, 
 it seemed to be filled with fishes. They turned this out, 
 and repeated the experiment, and again it was filled 
 with fish. The Chinese confessed that they did not 
 make them ; that they were the plunder of some foreign 
 conquest. This is not a singular thing in Chinese his- 
 tory; for in some of their scientific discoveries we have 
 found evidence that they did not make them, but stole 
 them. 
 
 The second story, of half a dozen, certainly five, re- 
 lates to the age of. Tiberius, the time of St. Paul ; and
 
 THE LOST ARTS. 13 
 
 tells of a Roman who had been banished, and who re- 
 turned to Rome, bringing a wonderful cup. This clip he 
 dashed upon the marble pavement, and it was crushed, 
 not broken, by the fall. It was dented some, and with 
 a hammer he easily brought it into shape again. It was 
 brilliant, transparent, but not brittle. I had a wine- 
 glass when I made this talk in New Haven ; and among 
 the audience was the owner, Professor Silliman. He 
 was kind enough to come to the platform when I had 
 ended, and say that he was familiar with most of my 
 facts, but, speaking of malleable glass, he had this to 
 say, that it was nearly a natural impossibility, and 
 that no amount of evidence which could be brought 
 would make him credit it. Well, the Romans got their 
 chemistry from the Arabians ; they brought it into Spain 
 eight centuries ago, and in their books of that age they 
 claim that they got from the Arabians malleable glass. 
 There is a kind of glass spoken of there, that, if sup- 
 ported by one end, by its own weight in twenty hours 
 would dwindle down to a fine line, and that you could 
 curve it around your wrist. Von Beust, the Chancellor 
 of Austria, has ordered secrecy in Hungary in regard 
 to a recently discovered process by which glass can be 
 used exactly like wool, and manufactured into cloth. 
 
 These are a few records. When you go to Rome, 
 they will show you a bit of glass like the solid rim of 
 this tumbler, a transparent glass, a solid thing, which 
 they lift up so as to sho\7 you that there is nothing 
 concealed; but in the centre of the glass is a drop of 
 colored glass, perhaps as large as a pea, mottled like a 
 duck, finely mottled with the shifting colored hues of 
 the neck, and which even a miniature pencil could not 
 do more perfectly. It is manifest that this drop of 
 liquid glass must have been poured, because there is 
 no joint. This must have been done by a greater heat
 
 14 THE LOST ARTS. 
 
 than the annealing process, because that process shows 
 breaks. 
 
 The imitation of gems has deceived not only the lay 
 people, but the connoisseurs. Some of these imitations 
 in later years have been discovered. The celebrated 
 vase of the Genoa Cathedral was considered a solid 
 emerald. The Roman-Catholic legend of it was, that it 
 was one of the treasures that the Queen of Sheba gave 
 to Solomon, and that it was the identical cup out of 
 which the Saviour drank at the Last Supper. Columbus 
 must have admired it. It was venerable in his day ; 
 it was death for anybody to touch it but a Catholic 
 priest. And when Napoleon besieged Genoa, I mean 
 the great Napoleon, not the present little fellow, it 
 was offered by the Jews to loan the Senate three mil- 
 lion dollars on that single article as security. Napo- 
 leon took it, and carried it to France, and gave it to 
 the Institute. Somewhat reluctantly the scholars said, 
 " It is not a stone : we hardly know what it is." 
 
 Cicero said that he had seen the entire Iliad, which 
 is a poem as large as the New Testament, written on 
 a skin so that it could be rolled up in the compass of a 
 nut-shell. Now, this is imperceptible to the ordinary 
 eye. You have seen the Declaration of Independence 
 in the compass of a quarter of a dollar, written with 
 glasses. I have to-day a paper at home, as long as half 
 my hand, on which was photographed the whole con- 
 tents of a London newspaper. It was put under a 
 dove's wing, and sent into Paris, where they enlarged 
 it, and read the news. This copy of the Iliad must 
 have been made by some such process. 
 
 In the Roman theatre, the Coliseum, which could 
 seat a hundred thousand people, the emperor's box, 
 raised to the highest tier, bore about the same propor- 
 tion to the space as this stand does to this hall ; and to
 
 THE LOST ARTS. 15 
 
 look down to the centre of a six-acre lot, was to look 
 a considerable distance. (" Considerable," by the way, 
 is not a Yankee word. Lord Chesterfield uses it in 
 his letters to his son, so it has a good English origin.) 
 Pliny says that Nero the tyrant had a ring with a gem 
 in it, which he looked through, and watched the sword- 
 play of the gladiators, men who killed each other to 
 amuse the people, more clearly than with the naked 
 eye. So Nero had an opera-glass. 
 
 So Mauritius the Sicilian stood on the promontory 
 of his island, and could sweep over the entire sea to 
 the coast of Africa with his nauscopite, which is a word 
 derived from two Greek words, meaning "to see a ship." 
 Evidently Mauritius, who was a pirate, had a marine 
 telescope. 
 
 You may visit Dr. Abbot's museum, where you will 
 see the ring of Cheops. Bunsen puts him five hundred 
 years before Christ. The signet of the ring is about the 
 size of a quarter of a dollar, and the engraving is invisi- 
 ble without the aid of glasses. No man was ever shown 
 into the cabinets of gems in Italy without being fur- 
 nished with a microscope to look at them. It would be 
 idle for him to look at them without one. He couldn't 
 appreciate the delicate lines and the expression of the 
 faces. If you go to Parma, they will show you a gem 
 once worn on the finger of Michael Angelo, of which 
 the engraving is two thousand years old, on which there 
 are the figures of seven women. You must have the 
 aid of a glass in order to distinguish the forms at all. 
 I have a friend who has a ring, perhaps three-quarters 
 of an inch in diameter, and on it is the naked figure of 
 the god Hercules. By the aid of glasses, you can dis- 
 tinguish the interlacing muscles, and count every sepa- 
 rate hair on the eyebrows. Layard says he would be 
 unable to read the engravings on Nineveh without strong
 
 16 THE LOST ARTS. 
 
 spectacles, they are so extremely small. Rawlinson 
 brought home a stone about twenty inches long and 
 ten wide, containing an entire treatise on mathematics. 
 It would be perfectly illegible without glasses. Now, 
 if we are unable to read it without the aid of glasses, 
 you may suppose the man who engraved it had pretty 
 strong spectacles. So the microscope, instead of dating 
 from our time, finds its brothers in the books of Moses, 
 and these are infant brothers. 
 
 So if you take colors. Color is, we say, an ornament. 
 We dye our dresses, and ornament our furniture. It is 
 an ornament to gratify the eye. But the Egyptians 
 impressed it into a new service. For them, it was a 
 method of recording history. Some parts of their his- 
 tory were written , but when they wanted to elaborate 
 history they painted it. Their colors are immortal, else 
 we could not know of it. We find upon the stucco of 
 their walls their kings holding court, their armies march- 
 ing out, their craftsmen in the ship-yard, with the ships 
 floating in the dock ; and, in fact, we trace all their rites 
 and customs painted in undying colors. The French 
 who went to Egypt with Napoleon said that all the 
 colors were perfect except the greenish-white, which 
 is the hardest for us. They had no difficulty with the 
 Tynan purple. The burned city of Pompeii was a city 
 of stucco. All the houses are stucco outside, and it 
 is stained with Tyrian purple, the royal color of 
 antiquity. 
 
 But you never can rely on the name of a color after 
 a thousand years. So the Tyrian purple is almost a 
 red, about the color of these curtains. This is a city 
 of all red. It had been buried seventeen hundred years ; 
 and if you take a shovel now, and clear away the ashes, 
 this color flames up upon you, a great deal richer than 
 any thing we can produce. You can go down into the
 
 THE LOST AUTS. 17 
 
 narrow vault which Nero built him as a retreat from 
 the great heat, and you will find the walls painted all 
 over with fanciful designs in arabesque, which have 
 been buried beneath the earth fifteen hundred years; 
 but when the peasants light it up with their torches, 
 the colors flash out before you as fresh as they were 
 in the days of St. Paul. Your fellow-citizen Mr. Page 
 spent twelve years in Venice, studying Titian's method 
 of mixing his colors, and he thinks he has got it. Yet 
 come down from Titian, whose colors are wonderfully 
 and perfectly fresh, to Sir Joshua Reynolds, and although 
 his colors are not yet a hundred years old, they are 
 fading : the colors on his lips are dying out, and the 
 cheeks are losing their tints. He did not know how 
 to mix well. All this mastery of color is as yet un- 
 equalled. If you should go with that most delightful 
 of all lecturers, Professor Tyndall, he would show you 
 in the spectrum the vanishing rays of violet, and prove 
 to you that beyond their limit there are rays still more 
 delicate, and to you invisible, but which he, by chemi- 
 cal paper, will make visible ; and he will tell you that 
 probably, though you see three or four inches more 
 than three hundred years ago your predecessors did, 
 yet three hundred years after our successors will sur- 
 pass our limit. The French have a theory that there is 
 a certain delicate shade of blue that Europeans cannot 
 see. In one of his lectures to his students, Ruskin 
 opened his Catholic mass-book, and said, " Gentlemen, 
 we are the best chemists in the world. No Englishman 
 ever could doubt that. But we cannot make such a 
 scarlet as that ; and even if we could, it would not last 
 for twenty years. Yet this is five hundred years old ! " 
 The Frenchman says, " I am the best dyer in Europe : 
 nobody can equal me, and nobody can surpass Lyons." 
 Yet in Cashmere., where the girls make shawls worth
 
 18 THE LOST ARTS. 
 
 thirty thousand dollars, they will show him three hun- 
 dred distinct colors, which he not only cannot make, 
 but cannot even distinguish. When I was in Rome, if 
 a lady \vdshed to wear a half-dozen colors at a masquer- 
 ade, and have them all in harmony, she would go to 
 the Jews ; for the Oriental eye is better than even those 
 of France or Italy, of which we think so highly. 
 
 Taking the metals, the Bible in its first chapters 
 shows that man first conquered metals there in Asia ; 
 and on that spot to-day he can work more wonders with 
 those metals than we can. 
 
 One of the surprises that the European artists re- 
 ceived, when the English plundered the summer palace 
 of the King of China, was the curiously wrought metal 
 vessels of every kind, far exceeding all the boasted skill 
 of the workmen of Europe. 
 
 Mr. Colton of " Trie Boston Journal," the first week 
 he landed in A.sia, found that his .chronometer was out 
 of order, from the steel of the works having become 
 rusted. " The London Medical and Surgical Journal " 
 advises surgeons not to venture to carry any lancets to 
 Calcutta, to have them gilded, because English steel 
 could not bear the atmosphere of India. Yet the 
 Damascus blades of the Crusades were not gilded, and 
 they are as perfect as they were eight centuries ago. 
 There was one at the London Exhibition, the point of 
 which could be made to touch the hilt, and which could 
 be put into a scabbard like a corkscrew, and bent every 
 way without breaking, like an American politician. 
 Now, the wonder of this is, that perfect steel is a marvel 
 of science. If a London chronometer-maker wants the 
 best steel to use in his chronometer, he does not send 
 to Sheffield, the centre of all science, but to the Pun- 
 jaub, the empire of the seven rivers, where there is no 
 science at all. The first needle ever made in England
 
 THE LOST ARTS. 19 
 
 was made in the time of Henry the Eighth, and made 
 by a negro ; and when he died, the art died with him. 
 Some of the first travellers in Africa stated that they 
 found a tribe in the interior who gave them better razors 
 than they had ; the irrepressible negro coming up in 
 science as in politics. The best steel is the greatest 
 triumph of metallurgy, and metallurgy is the glory of 
 chemistry. 
 
 The poets have celebrated the perfection of the Ori- 
 ental steel ; and it is recognized as the finest by Moore, 
 Byron, Scott, Southey, and many others. I have even 
 heard a young advocate of the lost arts find an argu- 
 ment in Byron's " Sennacherib," from the fact that the 
 mail of the warriors in that one short night had rusted 
 before the trembling Jews stole out in the morning to 
 behold the terrible work of the Lord. Scott, in his 
 " Tales of the Crusaders,*' for Sir Walter was curi- 
 ous in his love of the lost arts, describes a meeting 
 between Richard Cceur de Lion and Saladin. Saladin 
 asks Richard to show him the wonderful strength for 
 which he is famous, and the Norman monarch responds 
 by severing a bar of iron which lies on the floor of his 
 tent. Saladin says, " I cannot do that ; " but he takes 
 an eider-down pillow from the sofa, and, drawing his 
 keen blade across it, it falls in two pieces. Richard 
 says, " This is the black art ; it is magic ; it is the devil : 
 you cannot cut that which has no resistance ; " and 
 Saladin, to show him that such is not the case, takes a 
 scarf from his shoulders, which is so light that it almost 
 floats in the air, and, tossing it up, severs it before it 
 can descend. George Thompson told me he saw a man 
 in Calcutta throw a handful of floss-silk into the air, 
 and a Hindoo sever it into pieces with his sabre. We 
 can produce nothing like this. 
 
 Taking their employment of the mechanical forces,
 
 20 THE LOST ARTS. 
 
 and their movement of large masses from the earth, we 
 know that the Egyptians had the five, seven, or three 
 mechanical powers ; but we cannot account for the mul- 
 tiplication and increase necessary to perform the won- 
 ders they accomplished. 
 
 In Boston, lately, we have moved the Pelham Hotel, 
 weighing fifty thousand tons, fourteen feet, and are 
 very proud of it; and since then we have moved a 
 whole block of houses twenty-three feet, and I have 
 no doubt we will write a book about it: but there is 
 a book telling how Domenico Fontana of the sixteenth 
 century set up the Egyptian obelisk at Rome on end, 
 in the Papacy of Sixtus V. Wonderful ! Yet the 
 Egyptians quarried that stone, and carried it a hundred 
 and fifty miles, and the Romans brought it seven hun- 
 dred and fifty miles, and never said a word about it. 
 Mr. Batterson of Hartford, walking with Brunei, the 
 architect of the Thames tunnel, in Egypt, asked him 
 what he thought of the mechanical power of the Egyp- 
 tians ; and he said, " There is Pompey's Pillar : it is a 
 hundred feet high, and the capital weighs two thou- 
 sand pounds. It is something of a feat to hang two 
 thousand pounds at that height in the air, and the few 
 men that can do it would better discuss Egyptian me- 
 chanics." 
 
 Take canals. The Suez Canal absorbs half its re- 
 ceipts in cleaning out the sand which fills it continually, 
 and it is not yet known whether it is a pecuniary 
 success. The ancients built a canal at right angles 
 to ours ; because they knew it would not fill up if built 
 in that direction, and they knew such an one as ours 
 would. There were magnificent canals in the land of 
 the Jews, with perfectly arranged gates and sluices. 
 We have only just begun to understand ventilation 
 properly for our houses; yet late experiments at the
 
 THE LOST ARTS. 21 
 
 P3 r ramids in Egypt show that those Egyptian tombs 
 were ventilated in the most perfect and .scientific 
 manner. 
 
 Again : cement is modern, for the ancients dressed 
 and joined their stones so closely, that, in buildings 
 thousands of years old, the thin blade of a penknife 
 cannot be forced between them. The railroad dates 
 back to Egypt. Arago has claimed that they had a 
 knowledge of steam. A painting has been discovered 
 of a ship full of machinery, and a French engineer 
 said that the arrangement of this machinery could only 
 be accounted for by supposing the motive power to 
 have been steam. Bramah acknowledges that he took 
 the idea of his celebrated lock from an ancient Egyp- 
 tian pattern. De Tocqueville says there was no social 
 question that was not discussed to rags in Egypt. 
 
 " Well," say you, " Franklin invented the lightning- 
 rod." I have no doubt he did; but years before his 
 invention, and before muskets were invented, the old 
 soldiers on guard on the towers used Franklin's inven- 
 tion to keep guard with ; and if a spark passed between 
 them and the spear-head, they ran and bore the warn- 
 ing of the state and condition of affairs. After that 
 you will admit that Benjamin Franklin was not the 
 only one that knew of the presence of electricity, and 
 the advantages derived from its use. Solomon's Tem- 
 ple, you will find, was situated on an exposed point of 
 the hill : the temple was so lofty that it was often in 
 peril, and was guarded by a system exactly like that 
 of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 Well, I may tell you a little of ancient manufactures. 
 The Duchess of Burgundy took a necklace from the 
 neck of a mummy, and wore it to a ball given at 
 the Tuileries ; and everybody said they thought it was 
 the newest thing there. A Hindoo princess came into
 
 22 THE LOST ARTS. 
 
 court ; and her father, seeing her, said, " Go home, you 
 are not decently covered, go home;" and she said, 
 " Father, I have seven suits on ; " but the suits were 
 of muslin, so thin that the king could see through 
 them. A Roman poet says, "The girl was in the 
 poetic dress of the country." I fancy the French 
 would be rather astonished at this. Four hundred and 
 fifty years ago, the first spinning-machine was intro- 
 duced into Europe. I have evidence to show that it 
 made its appearance two thousand years before. 
 
 Well, I tell you this fact to show that perhaps we 
 don't invent just every thing. Why did I think to 
 grope in the ashes for this? Because all Egypt knew 
 the secret, which was not the knowledge of the pro- 
 fessor, the king, and the priest. Their knowledge won 
 an historic privilege which separated them from and 
 brought down the masses ; and this chain was broken 
 when Cambyses came down from Persia, and by his 
 genius and intellect opened the gates of knowledge, 
 thundering across Egypt, drawing out civilization from 
 royalty and priesthood. 
 
 Such was the system which was established in Egypt 
 of old. It was four thousand years before humanity 
 took that subject to a proper consideration ; and, when 
 this consideration was made, civilization changed her 
 character. Learning no longer hid in a convent, or 
 slumbered in the palace. No ! she came out, joining 
 hands with the people, ministering and dealing with 
 them. 
 
 We have not an astrology in the stars, serving only 
 the kings and priests: we have an astrology serving 
 all those around us. We have not a chemistry hidden 
 in underground cells, striving for wealth, striving to 
 change every thing into gold. No : we have a chem- 
 istry laboring with the farmer, and digging gold out of
 
 THE LOST ARTS. 23 
 
 the earth with the miner. Ah ! this is the nineteenth 
 century; and, of the hundreds of things we know, I 
 can show you ninety-nine of them which have been 
 anticipated. It is the liberty of intellect, and a diffu- 
 sion of knowledge, that has caused this anticipation. 
 
 When Gibbon finished his History of Rome, he said, 
 " The hand will never go back upon the dial of time, 
 when every thing was hidden in fear in the r*ark 
 ages." He made that boast as he stood at nigh* in 
 the ruins of the Corsani Palace, looking out upon the 
 places where the monks were chanting. That vision 
 disappeared, and there arose in its stead the Temple of 
 Jupiter. Could he look back upon the past, he would 
 see nations that went up in their strength, and down 
 to graves with fire in one hand, and iron in the other 
 hand, before Rome was peopled, which, in their strength, 
 were crushed in subduing civilization. But it is a very 
 different principle that governs this land; it is one 
 which should govern every land; it is one which this 
 nation needs to practise this diy. It is the human 
 property: it is the divine will that any man has the 
 right to know any thing which he knows will be ser- 
 viceable to himself and to his fellow-man, and that will 
 make art immortal if God means that it shall last.
 
 A MONODY 
 
 ON THE 
 
 DEATH OF WENDELL PHILLIPS, 
 
 (From the Century, February, 1891.) 
 
 ONE by one they go 
 Into the unknown dark 
 Starlit brows of the brave, 
 Voices that drew men's souls. 
 Rich is the land, O Death, 
 Can give you dead like our dead ! 
 Such as he from whose hand 
 The magic web of romance 
 Slipt, and the art was lost ! 
 Such as he who erewhile 
 The last of the Titan brood 
 With his thunder the Senate shook ; 
 Or he who, beside the Charles, 
 Untoucht of envy or hate, 
 Tranced the world with his song ; 
 Or that other, that grey-eyed seer 
 Who in pastoral Concord ways 
 With Plato and Hafiz walked. 
 
 II. 
 
 Not of them was the man 
 
 Whose wraith, through the mists of 
 
 night, 
 
 Through the shuddering wintry stars, 
 Has passed to eternal morn. 
 Fit were the moan of the sea 
 And the clashing of cloud on cloud 
 For the passing of that soul ! 
 
 Ever he faced the storm ! 
 No weaver of rare romance, 
 No patient framer of laws, 
 No maker of wondrous rhyme, 
 
 No bookman wrapt in his dream. 
 His was the voice that rang 
 In the fight like a bugle call, 
 And yet could be tender and low 
 As when, on a night in June, 
 The hushed wind sobs in the pines.; 
 His was the eye that flashed 
 With a saber's azure gleam, 
 Pointing to heights unwon ! 
 
 III. 
 
 Not for him were these days 
 Of clerkly and sluggish calm 
 To the petrel the swooping gale ! 
 Austere he seemed, but the hearts ! 
 Of all men beat in his breast ; 
 No fetter but galled his wrist, 
 No wrong that was not his own. 
 What if those eloquent lips 
 Curled with the old-time scorn ? 
 What if in needless hours 
 His quick hand closed on the hilt? 
 'T was the smoke from the well-w 
 
 fields 
 
 That clouded the veteran's eyes. 
 A fighter this to the end ! 
 
 Ah, if in coming times 
 
 Some giant evil arise, 
 
 And Honor falter and pale, 
 
 His were a name to conjure with ! j 
 
 God send his like again ! 
 
 THOMAS BAILEY AI.DRICH
 
 SPEECHES, LECTURES, AND LETTERS 
 
 OF 
 
 WENDELL PHILLIPS. 
 
 Second Series, with Portrait. Edited by Rev. T. C. Pease. Crown 8vo. 
 
 Cloth, $2-50. 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 The Right of Petition. 
 Letter to George Thompson. 
 
 Letter from Xanii'-. 
 Address to Boston School Children. 
 
 Irish Sympathy with the Abolition 
 Movement. 
 Welcome to George Thompson. 
 Kossuth. 
 Crispus Attacks. 
 Capital Punishment. 
 Suffrage for Women. 
 Woman's Rights and Woman's Duties. 
 The Eight- Hour Movement. 
 Tin- Chmtse. 
 The Foundation of the Labor Move- 
 ment. 
 The Labor Question. 
 The Maine Liquor Law. 
 Review of Dr. Crosby's Calm View of 
 Temperance. 
 
 The Bible and the Church. 
 The Pulpit. 
 Christianity a Battle, not a Dream. 
 The Puritan Principle and John 
 Brown. 
 The Education of the People. 
 The Scholar in a Republic. 
 The LOM 
 Daniel O'Connell. 
 Tributes to Theodore Parker. 
 Francis J:u i 
 Abraham Lincoln. 
 i.lixa Garrison. 
 William Llovd Garrison. 
 Harriet Martineau. 
 
 SPEECHES, LECTURES, AND LETTERS 
 
 BY 
 
 WENDELL PHILLIPS. 
 
 First Series. Compiled under direction of the great orator, by 
 
 JAMES EEDPATH. 
 Library Edition. Cloth. Tinted paper 82.5O 
 
 The Murder of Ixivejoy. 
 Woman's Rights. 
 Public Opinion. 
 Surrender of Sims. 
 Sims Anniversary. 
 Philosophy of the Aboli- 
 tion Movement. 
 Removal of Judge Loring 
 The Boston Mob. 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 The Pilgrims. 
 Letter to Judge Shaw and 
 President Walker. 
 Idols. 
 Harper's Ferrv. 
 Burial of John' Brown. 
 Lincoln's Election. 
 Mobs and Education. 
 Disunion. 
 
 Progress. 
 Under the Flag. 
 The War for the Union. 
 The Cabinet. 
 Letter to the Tribune. 
 Toussaint I/Ouverture. 
 Metropolitan Police. 
 The State ot the Country. 
 
 This volume contains the most prominent speeches of his anti-slavery career, 
 together with many later efforts; thus presenting varied specimens of his 
 matchless career. 
 
 The following speeches by Mr. Phillips are issued separately in paper, 25 
 cents each: " Eulogy of Garrison." "The Lost Arts," " Danie'l O'Connell," 
 "The Scholar in the Republic" (the Phi Beta Kappa Oration), " The Labor 
 Question." 
 
 Wendell Phillips Hall Association, 
 
 No. 812 Washington Street, Boston,
 
 A FEW EXTRACTS FROM OUR MANY LETTERS. 
 
 sympathize with the object." 
 
 E. H. CAPEN, President of Tufts College. 
 
 'I will gladly do what I can to carry forward your movement." 
 REV. EDWARD EVERETT HALE. 
 
 "I am heartily in sympathy with the purpose of the Association, 
 and shall be glad to aid it." REV. PHILIP S. MOXOM. 
 
 "I enclose my check for $50, for my subscription to the building 
 fund, wishing you entire success in trie laudable undertaking in \vhich 
 you are engaged." DANA ESTES. 
 
 "We will increase our subscription $50, making a total of $100 to 
 Wendell Phillips Hall Association." 
 
 DENNISON MANUFACTURING CO. 
 
 ALBERT METCALF, Treii*. 
 
 heartily sympathize with your object, and subscribe $50 for the 
 Phillips fund." JOHN G. WHITTIER. 
 
 "Enclosed pk-a.se find my contribution to your Association, 
 heartily sympathi/.i: with its purpose, and wish for it all success." 
 
 HON. WM. E. RUSSELL. 
 
 "I take pleasure in handing you herewith check for one hundred 
 dollars to perpetuate the memory of so great a mind and .'haractei : 
 Wendell Phillips." " A. SHUMAN. 
 
 "I enclose herewith check for $100, amount of subscription of The 
 Host on Herald Company to the Wendell Phillips Hall Association, 
 with best wishes." A. H. BINDEN, Cashier. 
 
 "You have on hand a large and very noble project. I am much 
 interested in it. There should be erected in Boston some worthy me- 
 morial of her great-hearted son, who loved his native city so inex- 
 pressibly that he endured persecution, and wrought mightily to make 
 it so free that the loot of a slave should never press its soil. 
 
 "You may put me down for $100 toward the building fund." 
 
 MARY A. LIVERMORE.
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 Santa Barbara 
 
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 STAMPED BELOW.