daughter of a modern Oxford professor would believe them about the
Germans (though, by the way, it is possible to talk great nonsense at
Oxford about foreigners when we are at war with them). But I do not
feel bound to believe that Cleopatra was well educated. Her father,
the illustrious Flute Blower, was not at all a parent of the Oxford
professor type. And Cleopatra was a chip of the old block.

BRITANNUS

I find among those who have read this play in manuscript a strong
conviction that an ancient Briton could not possibly have been like a
modern one. I see no reason to adopt this curious view. It is true that
the Roman and Norman conquests must have for a time disturbed the normal
British type produced by the climate. But Britannus, born before these
events, represents the unadulterated Briton who fought Caesar and
impressed Roman observers much as we should expect the ancestors of Mr.
Podsnap to impress the cultivated Italians of their time.

I am told that it is not scientific to treat national character as a
product of climate. This only shows the wide difference between common
knowledge and the intellectual game called science. We have men of
exactly the same stock, and speaking the same language, growing in Great
Britain, in Ireland, and in America. The result is three of the most
distinctly marked nationalities under the sun. Racial characteristics
are quite another matter. The difference between a Jew and a Gentile has
nothing to do with the difference between an Englishman and a German.
The characteristics of Britannus are local characteristics, not
race characteristics. In an ancient Briton they would, I take it, be
exaggerated, since modern Britain, disforested, drained, urbanified and
consequently cosmopolized, is presumably less characteristically British
than Caesar's Britain.

And again I ask does anyone who, in the light of a competent knowledge
of his own age, has studied history from contemporary documents, believe
that 67 generations of promiscuous marriage have made any appreciable
difference in the human fauna of these isles? Certainly I do not.

JULIUS CAESAR

As to Caesar himself, I have purposely avoided the usual anachronism of
going to Caesar's books, and concluding that the style is the man. That
is only true of authors who have the specific literary genius, and have
practised long enough to attain complete self-expression in letters.
It is not true even on these conditions in an age w