f Wales once.
Perhaps, if he were put to it to write a history, with no books
to guide him, he would name you as many as seven of them, and
supply each with more or less true stories. In reality, of
course, there were eight centuries of Welsh kings; and before
them, the Roman occupation,--which he also remembers, but very
vaguely; and before that, he has the strongest impression that
there were ages of wide sovereignty and splendor. The kings he
would name, naturally, are the ones that made the most mark.--I
think the Romans, in constructing or making Greeks construct for
them their ancient history, did very much the same kind of thing.
They remembered the names of seven kings, with tales about them,
and built on those. There were the kings who had stood out and
stood for most; and the Romans remembered what they stood for.
So here I think we get real history; whereas in the stories of
republican days we may see the efforts of great families to
provide themselves with a great past. But I doubt we could take
anything _aupied de la lettre;_ or that it would profit us to do
so if we could. Here is a pointer: we have seen how in India
a long age of Kshattriya supremacy preceded the supremacy
of the Brahmins. Now observe Kshattriya Romulus followed
by Brahmin Numa.

I do not see why Madame Blavatsky shold have so strongly insisted
on the truth of the story of the roman Kings unless there were
more in it than mere pralayic historicity. Unless it were of
bigger value, that is, than Andorran or Montenegrin annals.
Rome, after the Etruscan domination, was a meanly built little
city; but there were remains from pre-Etruscan times greater
than anything built under the Republic. Rome is a fine modern
capital now; but there were times in the age of papal rule, when
it was a miserable depopulated village of great ruins, with
wolves prowling nightly through the weed-grown streets. Yet even
then the tradition of _Roma Caput Mundi_ reigned among the
wretched inhabitants,--witness Rienzi: it was the one thing,
besides the ruins, to tell of ancient greatness. Some such
feeling, borne down out of a forgotten past, impelled Republican
Rome on the path of conquest. It was not even a tradition, at
that time; but the essence of a tradition that remained as a
sense of high destinies.

Who, then, was Romulus?--Some king's son from Ruta or Daitya, who
came in his lordly Atlantean ships, and builded a city on the
Tiber? Very l