is no help for it: you cannot catch Spring in a trap, or cage
up Summer lest he go.--It seems now we must believe in a new
doctrine: that certain 'Nordics' are the Superior Race, and you
must be blue-eyed and large and blond, or you shall never pass
Peter's wicket. One of these days we shall have some learned
ingenious Hottentot arising, to convince us poor others of the
innate superiority of Hottentottendom, and that we had better bow
down! . . . But to return:

The Parthians remained little more than Central-Asian nomads:
something between the Huns who destroved civilization, and the
Turks who cultivated it for all they were worth (in a Central
Asian-nomad sort of way). All their magnates were Turanian;
they retained a taste for tent-life; their army and fighting
tactics where of the desert-horseman type: mounted bowmen,
charging and shooting, wheeling and scattering in flight,--which
put not your trust in, or 'ware the "Parthian shot." They were
not armed for close combat; and were quite defenseless in
winter, when the weather slackened their bow-string. True, Aryan
Iran put its impress on them: so that presently their kings wore
long beards in the Achaemenian fashion, made for themselves an
Achaemenian descent, called themselves by Achaemenian names.
They took on, too, the Achaemenian religion of Zoroaster:--so,
but much more earnestly and adventurously and _opera-bouffe_
grimly. Ts'in Shi Hwangti took on the quest of Tao. There was
also a stratum of Hellenistic culture in their domains, and they
took on something of that. When they conquered Babylonia, it was
inevitable that they should move their headquarters down into
that richest and most thickly-populated part of their realm--to
Seleucia, the natural capital, one might suppos?--a huge
Hellenistic city well organized for world-commerce.--But let
these nomad kings come into it with their horde, and what would
become of the ordered civic life? Nomads do not take well
to life in great cities; they love the openness of their
everlasting plains, and the narrrow streets and high buildings
irk their sensibilities. For this reason, and perhaps because
they recognised their deficienceies, they shunned Seleucia; and
built themselves lumbering straggling gawky Ctesiphon across the
Tigris to be their chief capital;--for they had many; not
abiding to be long in one place, but gadding about as of old.
Still, Greek culture was not to be denied. They coined mon