Excerpt from Old and Ancient Rye
Bacon points out the error in referring to things that existed long ago as ancient. "These times are ancient times when the world is ancient, and not those which were accounted ancient, ordine retrogrado, by a computation backward from ours." The most ancient thing must still exist. Could we identify a living descendant of the mound builders, then would Rome, and perhaps Egypt, have to recognize here an older race, and that America was not the New World. But as it is, we have only musty bones, scarce distinguishable from the surrounding dust, to furnish evidence of an infant race that died in the youth of human existence leaving only a hint of its story. Such hints and our share of the world itself are our only true antiquities. Heaps of earth, holes in cliffs with broken pottery and grinning skulls are all that's ancient, the meagre record of perhaps thousands of years of human existence sunk now below the horizon of memory, and since, on this continent, until the coming of the European, man ran in primeval forests like the brute, the record of one, multiplied by the number of his days, giving the whole history of his life, so that
"History not wanted yet.
Leaned on her elbow, watching Time, whose course.
Eventful, should supply her with a theme."
Meanwhile, on the southern coast of England, there jutted into the channel sea a rocky hill inhabited by a hardy race that furnished history with a theme eight hundred years or more ago, and ever since. Now' the dwellers of the hill form only the quiet hamlet of Rye, but "in her glorv's time" Rye was one of the ports that furnished England ships and men to win and hold the mastery of the seas.
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