s after,--which
happened to be Italian. Not for him, in the very slightest,
Filicaia's or Mazzini's dream! Good practical soul, what would
he have done with dreaming?--But he had his feet on the ground,
and was soaked through, willy nilly, with its forces; he lived
in touch with realities, with the seasons and the days and
nights,--how we do forget those great, simple, life-giving,
cleansing things!--and his mind was molded to what he owed to the
soil, to the realities, to _Dea Roma;_--and Duty became a great
thing in his life. Out of all this comes something that makes
this narrow little cultureless bandit city almost sympathetic to
us,--and very largely indeed admirable.

They knew how to keep their heads. There were those two races
among them,--races or orders;--and a mort of politics between the
two. Greek cities, in like manner but generally less radically
divided, knew no method but for one side to be perpetually
banishing the other, turn and turn about, and wholesale; but
these spare, tough Romans effect compromise after compromise,
till Patricians and Plebs are molten down into one common type.
They are not very brilliant, even at their native game of war:
given a good general, their enemies are pretty sure to trounce
them. Pyrrhus, a fine tactician but no great strategist, does so
several times;--and then they reply to his offers of peace, that
they make no peace with enemies still camped on Italian soil.--
Comes next a real master-strategist, Hannibal; and senate and
people, time after time, are forced (like Balbus in the poem)

"With a frankness that I'm sure will charm ye
To own it is all over with the army."

He wipes them out in a most satisfactory and workmanlike manner.
Their leading citizens, _ipso facto_ their generals (amateur
soldiers always cabbage-hoers at heart) afford him a good deal of
amusement; as if you should send out the mayor of Jonesville,
Arkansaw, against a Foch or a Hindenburg. One of them, a fool of
a fellow, blunders into a booby-trap and loses the army which is
almost the sole hope of Rome; and comes home, utterly defeated,
--to be gravely thanked by the Senate for not committing suicide
after his defeat: "for not despairing of the Republic." Ah,
there is real Great Stuff in that; they are admirable peasant
bandits after all! Most people would have straight court
martialed and beheaded the man; as England hanged poor Admiral
Byng _pour encourager les autres