He calls together the mountain rulers; makes friends with Tigranes, an Armenian prince, a vassal of the Mede, who has his wrongs likewise to avenge.  And the two little armies of foot-soldiers—­the Persians had no cavalry—­defeat the innumerable horsemen of the Mede, take the old king, keep him in honourable captivity, and so change, one legend says, in a single battle, the fortunes of the whole East.

And then begins that series of conquests of which we know hardly anything, save the fact that they were made.  The young mountaineer and his playmates, whom he makes his generals and satraps, sweep onward towards the West, teaching their men the art of riding, till the Persian cavalry becomes more famous than the Median had been.  They gather to them, as a snowball gathers in rolling, the picked youth of every tribe whom they overcome.  They knit these tribes to them in loyalty and affection by that righteousness—­that truthfulness and justice—­for which Isaiah in his grandest lyric strains has made them illustrious to all time; which Xenophon has celebrated in like manner in that exquisite book of his—­the “Cyropaedia.”  The great Lydian kingdom of Croesus—­Asia Minor as we call it now—­goes down before them.  Babylon itself goes down, after that world-famed siege which ended in Belshazzar’s feast; and when Cyrus died—­still in the prime of life, the legends seem to say—­he left a coherent and well-organised empire, which stretched from the Mediterranean to Hindostan.

So runs the tale, which to me, I confess, sounds probable and rational enough.  It may not do so to you; for it has not to many learned men.  They are inclined to “relegate it into the region of myth;” in plain English, to call old Herodotus a liar, or at least a dupe.  What means those wise men can have at this distance of more than 2000 years, of knowing more about the matter than Herodotus, who lived within 100 years of Cyrus, I for myself cannot discover.  And I say this without the least wish to disparage these hypercritical persons.  For there are—­and more there ought to be, as long as lies and superstitions remain on this earth—­a class of thinkers who hold in just suspicion all stories which savour of the sensational, the romantic, even the dramatic.  They know the terrible uses to which appeals to the fancy and the emotions have been applied, and are still applied to enslave the intellects, the consciences, the very bodies of men and women.  They dread so much from experience the abuse of that formula, that “a thing is so beautiful it must be true,” that they are inclined to reply:  “Rather let us say boldly, it is so beautiful that it cannot be true.  Let us mistrust, or even refuse to believe a priori, and at first sight, all startling, sensational, even poetic tales, and accept nothing as history, which is not as dull as the ledger of a dry-goods’ store.”  But I think that experience, both in nature and in society, are against that ditch-water philosophy.  The weather,