The Instruction of Ptah-hotep and the Instruction of Kegemni

the names of ancient peoples, he is conscious of, and yearns instinctively toward, an immense and ever-receding past. With the one, as with the other, this unaccountable passion is so knitted into his soul that it will never, among a thousand distractions and adverse influences, entirely forsake him; nor can such a person by willing cause it to come or to depart. He will live much in imagination, treading fair places now wrapped in their inevitable shroud of wind-blown sand; building anew temples whose stones hardly remain one upon the other, consecrated to gods as dead as their multitudes of worshippers; holding converse with the sages who, with all their wisdom, could not escape the ultimate oblivion. A spectator of splendid pageants, a participant in strange rites, a witness to vast tragedies, he also has admittance to the magical kingdom, to which is added the freedom of the city of Remembrance. His care will be to construct, patiently and with much labor, a picture (which is often less than an outline) of the conditions of the humanity that has been. He neither rejects nor despises any relic, however trivial or unlovely, that will help him, in its degree, to understand better that humanity or to bridge the wide chasms of his ignorance. Moreover, great age hallows all things, even the most mean, investing them with a certain sanctity; and the little sandal of a nameless