The intelligent world has of late been passing through one of its cyclical phases. It would hardly be suspected that in these times the daily tale of news from home and abroad should be so wanting in human interest that it was necessary to seek for recondite subjects. Nevertheless astute editors or others on the staff of our daily newspapers have been constrained to discover that all is not well in our artistic atmosphere, and they call attention to the sad need of refinement in our surroundings, that our street architecture, though showing signs of grace, lacks coherence and taste, that our statues are deplorable, our public monuments wanting in dignity or design, and that, in fine, the necessity for organization and method is called for as much for our spiritual betterment as it is on the material side. A number of distinguished men, architects, painters, and critics of both, and of all else, have come forward, and their plans for a new and glorified earth have been placed before a grateful world.

In Northern mythology Wayland the Smith corresponds to the Roman Vulcan or the Greek Hephaestus; and his name cannot have been attached to the well-known group of sarsen slabs in Berkshire till the Teutonic invaders reached the upper Thames in the fifth century. This cunning worker in metals appears on the Franks casket in the British Museum, dating from soon after 700; and the monument is mentioned under the name of Wayland's Smithy in a charter of King Eadred to Aelfheh dated 955.

The Dorian invasion, as an episode in Greek history, exhibits few complexities. Ancient tradition is unanimous upon the fact that the invasion was at once a more or less definite event or series of events in time and a clear turning-point in historical development. Modern historians of ancient Greece have largely twisted the comparatively clear tradition of antiquity into a variety of theories, and the whole question in their hands remains a problem which from their point of view is still sub iudice.

Archaeological research on the other hand, as is not infrequently the case, serves to amplify and explain the ancient traditions in a more satisfactory way. No very clear attempt has as yet been made by archaeologists to establish the facts of the Dorian invasion or to track down the historical Dorians. But the results of recent research in the Peloponnese on sites where tradition places the Dorians in fullest force points to a culture at these sites which, appearing about the eleventh century B.C, has all the characteristics of the culture of an invader, and differs radically and completely from what we know to have been mainland culture during the millennium preceding the eleventh century B.C.

The purpose of this paper is to review the archaeological evidence concerning the Dorians in the light both of the literary tradition and of some new archaeological discoveries.

Most of the carvings herein to be described came into their late owners' hands from private collections, and—as unfortunately is generally the case in similar circumstances—in almost every instance unaccompanied by records of their earlier histories. All but three of them—the Crucifixion, the Ascension, and the one with two saints—came lately from Paris.

Until the publication in 1911 of The Abbot's House at Westminster by Dr. Armitage Robinson, it had been assumed by all previous investigators of the monastic buildings at Westminster that the Misericorde stbod upon the site of what is now Ashburnham House. From documentary evidence Dr. Robinson was led to the conclusions that this site was actually that of the Prior's House, and that the Misericorde lay either in an angle south-west of the Frater and contiguous with it, or in a loft at its west end as at Durham. He inclined strongly, however, to the former hypothesis, influenced by the remains of two vaulting-shafts on either side and south of a hatch communicating with the Frater. One further conclusion was that the Misericorde was upstairs. ‘If there was a vaulted chamber under the Misericorde which formed part of a passage to the kitchen, all the facts fit in well together.’ It may be remarked that further documentary evidence has served only to confirm Dr. Robinson's view, but until recently no attempt has been made at any serious investigation of the site, though the late Clerk of the Works, Mr. Thomas Wright, sen., left some valuable notes of observations made by him on the occasion of the laying of a drain.