—­He calls attention, too, to the fact that Tarquin the Proud is made a typical Greek Tyrant, and is said to have been driven out of Rome in 510,—­the very year in which that other typical Greek Tyrant, Hippias, was driven out of Athens;—­so that on the whole it is not a view for easy unthinking rejection.  But Madame Blavatsky left a good maxim on these matters:  that tradition will tell you more truth than what goes for history will; and she is quite positive that there is much more truth in the tales about the kings than in what comes down about the early Republic.  Only you must interpret the traditions; you must understand them.  Let us go about, and see if we can arrive at something.

Before the influx of the Crest-Wave began, Rome was a very petty provincial affair, without any place at all in the great sweep of world-story.  Her annals are about as important as those of the Samnium of old, of which we know nothing; or those, say, of Andorra now, about which we care less.  Our school histories commonly end at the Battle of Acium; which is the place where Roman history becomes universal and important:  a point wisely made and strongly insisted on by Mr. Stobart.  I shows how thoroughly we lack any true sense of what history is and is for.  We are so wrapped up in politics that our vision of the motions of the Human Spirit is obscured.  There were lots of politics in Republican Rome, and you may say none in the empire; so we make for the pettiness that obsesses us, and ignore the greatness whose effects are felt yet.  Rome played at politics:  old-time conqueror-race Patricians against old-time conquered-race Plebians:  till the two were merged into one and she grew tired of the game.  She played at war until her little raidings and conquests had carried her out of the sphere of provincial politics, and she stood on the brink of the great world.  Then the influx of important souls began; she entered into history, presently threw up politics forever, and performed, so far as it was in her to do so, her mission in the world.  What does History care for the election results in some village in Montenegro?  Or for the passage of the Licinian Rogations, or the high exploits of Terentilius Harsa?

Yet, too, we must get a view of this people in pralaya, that we may understand better the workings of the Human Spirit in its fulness.  But we must see the forest, and not lose sight and sense of it while botanizing over individual trees.  We must forget the interminable details of wars and politics that amount to nothing; that so we may apprehend the form, features, color, of this aspect of humanity.