by our Government in order to
pander to the vanity of the English nation.

I will say this, which Archbishop Whately, in a late edition,
foreshadows, wittily enough--that if one or two thousand years hence,
when the history of the late Emperor Napoleon the Third, his rise and
fall, shall come to be subjected to critical analysis by future
Philistine historians of New Zealand or Australia, it will be proved by
them to be utterly mythical, incredible, monstrous--and that all the
more, the more the actual facts remain to puzzle their unimaginative
brains. What will they make two thousand years hence, of the landing at
Boulogne with the tame eagle? Will not that, and stranger facts still,
but just as true, be relegated to the region of myth, with the dream of
Astyages, and the young and princely herdsman playing at king over his
fellow-slaves?

But enough of this. To me these bits of romance often seem the truest,
as well as the most important portions of history.

When old Herodotus tells me how, King Astyages having guarded the
frontier, Harpagus sent a hunter to young Cyrus with a fresh-killed hare,
telling him to open it in private; and how, sewn up in it was the letter,
telling him that the time to rebel was come, I am inclined to say, That
must be true. It is so beneath the dignity of history, so quaint and
unexpected, that it is all the more likely _not_ to have been invented.

So with that other story--How young Cyrus, giving out that his
grandfather had made him general of the Persians, summoned them all, each
man with a sickle in his hand, into a prairie full of thorns, and bade
them clear it in one day; and how when they, like loyal men, had
finished, he bade them bathe, and next day he took them into a great
meadow and feasted them with corn and wine, and all that his father's
farm would yield, and asked them which day they liked best; and, when
they answered as was to be expected, how he opened his parable and told
them, "Choose, then, to work for the Persians like slaves, or to be free
with me."

Such a tale sounds to me true. It has the very savour of the parables of
the Old Testament; as have, surely, the dreams of the old Sultan, with
which the tale begins. Do they not put us in mind of the dreams of
Nebuchadnezzar, in the Book of Daniel?

Such stories are actually so beautiful that they are very likely to be
true. Understand me, I only say likely; the ditch-water view of history
is not all wr