he longest
record of culture; that there may be not only a civilisation
but even a chivalry older than history. Perhaps the table-land
with its round top has a romantic reminiscence of a round table.
Perhaps it is only a fantastic effect of evening, for it is felt
most when the low skies are swimming with the colours of sunset,
and in the shadows the shattered rocks about its base take on
the shapes of titanic paladins fighting and falling around it.
I only know that the mere shape of the hill and vista of the landscape
suggested such visions and it was only afterwards that I heard
the local legend, which says it is here that some of the Christian
knights made their last stand after they lost Jerusalem and which
names this height The Mountain of the Latins.

They fell, and the ages rolled on them the rocks of scorn;
they were buried in jests and buffooneries. As the Renascence
expanded into the rationalism of recent centuries, nothing seemed
so ridiculous as to butcher and bleed in a distant desert not only
for a tomb, but an empty tomb. The last legend of them withered
under the wit of Cervantes, though he himself had fought in the last
Crusade at Lepanto. They were kicked about like dead donkeys
by the cool vivacity of Voltaire; who went off, very symbolically,
to dance attendance on the new drill-sergeant of the Prussians.
They were dissected like strange beasts by the serene disgust
of Gibbon, more serene than the similar horror with which
he regarded the similar violence of the French Revolution.
By our own time even the flippancy has become a platitude.
They have long been the butt of every penny-a-liner who can talk of a
helmet as a tin pot, of every caricaturist on a comic paper who can draw
a fat man falling off a bucking horse; of every pushing professional
politician who can talk about the superstitions of the Middle Ages.
Great men and small have agreed to contemn them; they were renounced
by their children and refuted by their biographers; they were exposed,
they were exploded, they were ridiculed and they were right.

They were proved wrong, and they were right. They were judged
finally and forgotten, and they were right. Centuries after
their fall the full experience and development of political
discovery has shown beyond question that they were right.
For there is a very simple test of the truth; that the very
thing which was dismissed, as a dream of the ages of faith,
we have been forced to tu