r decisive; they never make history; the very
best of them might just as well not have been fought. But at
Patay the forces which made it inevitable France should be a
nation struck down into the physical plane and made themselves
manifest: as far as that plane is concerned, the centuries of
French history flow from the battlefield of Patay. But what made
trumpery Agincourt was only the fierce will of a cruel, ambitious
fighting king; and what flowed from it was a few decades of war
and misery. That by way of illustration how history is envisaged
and taught: depend upon it, by every people; it is not peculiar
to this one or that.--Well then, the fish we are at liberty to
catch in this particular Roman pool is a period during which Rome
was part of the Etruscan Empire.

The fact is generally accepted, I believe; and is, of course,
the proposition we started from. How long the period was, we
cannot say. The Tarquins were from Tarquinii in Etruria;
perhaps a line of Etruscan governors. The gentleman from Clusium
who swore by the Nine Gods was either a king who brought back a
rebellious Rome to temporary submission, or the last Etruscan
monarch in whose empire it was included. But here is the point:
whether fifty or five hundred years long--and perhaps more likely
the former than the latter--this period of foreign rule was long
enough to make a big break in the national tradition, and to
throw all preceding events out of perspective.

At the risk of _longueurs_--and other things--let me take an
illustration from scenes I know. I have heard peasants in Wales
talking about events before the conquest;--people who have never
learnt Welsh history out of books, and have nothing to go on but
local legends;--and placing the old unhappy far-off things and
battles long ago at "over a hundred years back, I shouldn'
wonder." It is the way of tradition to foreshorten things like
that,--Nothing much has happened in Wales since those ancient
battles with the English; so the six or seven centuries of
English rule are dismissed as "over a hundred years." Rome under
the Etruscans, like Wales under the English, would have had no
history of her own: there would have been nothing to impress
itself on the race-memory. Such times fade out easily: they
seem to have been very short, or are forgotten altogether. But
this same Welsh peasant, who thus forgets and foreshortens recent
history, always remembers that there were kings o