THE hand of death has lately fallen heavily on the ranks of the older scholars; and classical archæology has especial losses to record Only a few months back, there passed away Heinrich Brunn, the doyen and most picturesque representative of German Hellenism; and we in England have now sustained a loss no less severe. Though Newton had of late years become too infirm for active work, and had in fact done little since his retirement in 1885, it is now, when he has gone from among us, that his loss will be most keenly felt. It was not so much in his actual achievements, though these were considerable enough, that his truest claim upon our recollection lay; nor yet in the fact that he had practically opened up a new science for English scholarship: it was more than all in the personality and force of character of the man, which impressed itself on all with whom he came in contact, and the masterful influence which was by no means confined within the limits of his own science. It was to this that he owed his success; and there have been few instances in which a necessity has been so opportunely met by the man most adapted for it. For when Newton joined the Museum in 1840, the study of actual monuments was still in its infancy; Greece itself was very little known, and a pseudo-classicism had been evolved from the mistaken illustration of literary sources with an often inferior Græco-Roman art. Behind him lay the period of learned and ingenious but useless theory; two things were needed to clear away this tangle of ideas—a fuller supply of the best practical material, and a wider scientific method.