Let Hercules himself do what he may,
          The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.

And again: 

          Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,
          Thou shalt not escape calumny.

This, it is to be feared, is merely the sad truth, for mankind, while it admires both greatness and goodness, would seem to resent the one and only half believe in the other.  At all events, nothing is more to its taste than the rumour that detracts from the great or sullies the good; and so long as the rumour be entertaining, it has little concern for its truth.

Froude, in writing of Caesar, has this to say admirably to our purpose: 

In ages which we call heroic, the saint works miracles, the warrior performs exploits beyond the strength of natural man.  In ages less visionary, which are given to ease and enjoyment, the tendency is to bring a great man down to the common level, and to discover or invent faults which shall show that he is or was but a little man after all.  Our vanity is soothed by evidence that those who have eclipsed us in the race of life are no better than ourselves, or in some respects worse than ourselves; and if to these general impulses be added political or personal animosity, accusations of depravity are circulated as surely about such men, and are credited as readily as under other influences are the marvellous achievements of a Cid or a St. Francis.

The absurdity of a calumny may be as evident as the absurdity of a miracle; the ground for belief may be no more than a lightness of mind, and a less pardonable wish that it may be true.  But the idle tale floats in society, and by and by is written down in books and passes into the region of established realities.

The proportion of such idle tales seriously printed as history can never, of course, be computed.  Sometimes one is tempted to think that history is mainly “whole cloth.”  Certainly the lives of such men as Caesar are largely made up of what one might term illustrative fictions rather than actual facts.  The story of Caesar and Cleopatra is probably such an “illustrative fiction,” representing something that might very well have happened to Caesar, whether it did so or not.  At all events, it does his fame no great harm, unlike another calumny, which, as it does not seem “illustrative”—­that is, not in keeping with his general character—­we are at liberty to reject.  Both alike, however, were the product of the gossip, the embodied littleness of human nature endeavouring then, as always, to minimize and discredit the strong man, who, whatever his actual faults, at least strenuously shoulders for his fellows the hard work of the world.

The great have usually been strong enough to smile contempt on their traducers—­Caesar’s answer to an infamous epigram of the poet Catullus was to ask him to dinner—­but even so, at what extra cost, what “expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” have their achievements been bought, because of these curs that bark forever at the heels of fame!