The most ancient of which tradition speaks, was a chapel beyond the Tiber, at Rome, which is said to have been founded in 217, on the site where S. Maria in Trastevere now stands.

Ancient of days was Rehua, with streaming hair.

I have shown that in the field of artistic excellence, in literary composition, in the arts of government and legislation, and even in the realm of philosophical speculation, the ancients were our school-masters, and that among them were some men of most marvellous genius, who have had no superiors among us.

"Those Ancients have been faithful Imitators and wise Observers of that Nature, which is so torn and ill-represented in our Plays.

The most ancient of them are often the shortest, but they belong to the period when southern Spain under Mahometan rule was at the height of its prosperity, and Arabian learning, art, and literature made her rank among the first countries in Europe.

Thus in all those arts of which modern civilization is proudest, and in which the genius of man has soared to the loftiest heights, the ancients were not merely our equals,they were our superiors.

[Footnote 15: Ancient is an old word for ensign.

The most ancient of these corporations was the Parisian Hanse, or corporation of the bourgeois for canal navigation, which probably dates its origin back to the college of Parisian Nautes, existing before the Roman conquest.

We have the names of great architects, who reared various and faultless models, but they all worked upon the same principles, and these can never be subverted; so that in architecture the ancients are our schoolmasters, whose genius we revere the more we are acquainted with their works.

"There is express historical or traditional evidence, as ancient as history, of the system of religion being taught mankind by revelation.

In the third place, that which is more ancient than intellect, which replenishes intelligence and is essentially perfective of it, is called intelligible; and this is the intelligible which Timaeus in Plato places in the order of a paradigm, prior to the demiurgic intellect and intellectual energy.