So scene on scene floats lightly, as a haze
That comes and goes with sudden gust and lull:
Limned with the sunset hues of other days,
They are but dreams; yet dreams are beautiful.
Archibald Henry Sayce (Academy, Dec. 5, 1885).
As in the two preceding quotations, the subject is the supposed conflict of religion and science. Haeckel (born 1834, recently dead) was the most ruthless of all the biologists in accounting for evolution and all progress by a struggle for existence. Renan (1823-1892), the French writer, whose love of Christianity survived his belief in it, speaks of the passing away of the old faith as “the golden glory of the dying day,” and says that in its death it will be more beautiful than in its life, when it led to passion, persecution and war. The penultimate verse refers to the time when temporal power was removed from the church, and she reverted to the humility, and also the beauty, of primitive Christianity when it came in its morning glory from the East.
The fact that these fine verses are by the great philologist and archæologist, Professor Sayce, who has not publicly appeared in the rôle of a poet, adds greatly to their interest. The few verses he has published have mostly appeared over the initials “A.H.S.” in the old Academy (the present periodical is a different concern), and he was not known to the public as the author.
Anything about Professor Sayce must be interesting to the reader, and I, therefore, need not apologize for mentioning the following incidents, which, I imagine, are known only among his friends. In 1870, during the Franco-German War, Mr. Sayce was ordered to be shot at Nantes as a German spy, and only escaped “by the skin of his teeth.” It was just before Gambetta had flown in his balloon out of Paris, and there was no recognized Government in the country. Nantes was full of fugitives, and bands of Uhlans were in the neighbourhood. Mr. Sayce was arrested when walking round the old citadel examining its walls—not realizing that it was occupied by French troops. Fortunately, some ladies of the garrison came in during his examination to see the interesting young prisoner and, after Mr. Sayce had been placed against the wall and a soldier told off to shoot him, they prevailed upon the Commandant to give him a second examination, which ended in his acquittal.
Mr. Sayce was also among the Carlists in the Carlist war of 1873, and was present at some of the so-called battles which, he says, were dangerous only to the onlookers. He also once had a pitched battle with Bedouins in Syria.
Professor Sayce (he became Professor in 1876) has also the proud distinction of being the only person known to have survived the bite of the Egyptian cerastes asp, which is supposed to have killed Cleopatra. He accidentally trod on the reptile in the desert some three or four miles north of Assouan and was bitten in the leg. Luckily, he happened to be just outside the dahabieh in which he was travelling with three Oxford friends, one of them the late Master of Balliol. The cook had a small pair of red-hot tongs, with which he had been preparing lunch, and Professor Sayce was able to burn the bitten leg down to the bone within two minutes after the accident; thus saving his life at the expense of a few weeks’ lameness.