I will say this, which Archbishop Whately, in a late edition, foreshadows, wittily enough—­that if one or two thousand years hence, when the history of the late Emperor Napoleon the Third, his rise and fall, shall come to be subjected to critical analysis by future Philistine historians of New Zealand or Australia, it will be proved by them to be utterly mythical, incredible, monstrous—­and that all the more, the more the actual facts remain to puzzle their unimaginative brains.  What will they make two thousand years hence, of the landing at Boulogne with the tame eagle?  Will not that, and stranger facts still, but just as true, be relegated to the region of myth, with the dream of Astyages, and the young and princely herdsman playing at king over his fellow-slaves?

But enough of this.  To me these bits of romance often seem the truest, as well as the most important portions of history.

When old Herodotus tells me how, King Astyages having guarded the frontier, Harpagus sent a hunter to young Cyrus with a fresh-killed hare, telling him to open it in private; and how, sewn up in it was the letter, telling him that the time to rebel was come, I am inclined to say, That must be true.  It is so beneath the dignity of history, so quaint and unexpected, that it is all the more likely not to have been invented.

So with that other story—­How young Cyrus, giving out that his grandfather had made him general of the Persians, summoned them all, each man with a sickle in his hand, into a prairie full of thorns, and bade them clear it in one day; and how when they, like loyal men, had finished, he bade them bathe, and next day he took them into a great meadow and feasted them with corn and wine, and all that his father’s farm would yield, and asked them which day they liked best; and, when they answered as was to be expected, how he opened his parable and told them, “Choose, then, to work for the Persians like slaves, or to be free with me.”

Such a tale sounds to me true.  It has the very savour of the parables of the Old Testament; as have, surely, the dreams of the old Sultan, with which the tale begins.  Do they not put us in mind of the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar, in the Book of Daniel?

Such stories are actually so beautiful that they are very likely to be true.  Understand me, I only say likely; the ditch-water view of history is not all wrong.  Its advocates are right in saying great historic changes are not produced simply by one great person, by one remarkable event.  They have been preparing, perhaps for centuries.  They are the result of numberless forces, acting according to laws, which might have been foreseen, and will be foreseen, when the science of History is more perfectly understood.

For instance, Cyrus could not have conquered the Median Empire at a single blow, if first that empire had not been utterly rotten; and next, if he and his handful of Persians had not been tempered and sharpened, by long hardihood, to the finest cutting edge.