Here, still in the foot-hills, is a pool that does look, if not nymphatic, at least a little fishy, as they say; the story of Rome’s dealings with Lars Porsenna.  It even looks as if something historical might be caught in it.  The Roman historians have been obviously camouflaging:  they do not want you to examine this too closely.  Remember that all these things came down by memory, among a people exceedingly proud, and that had been used to rely on records,—­which records had been burnt by the Gauls.  Turn to your English History, and you shall probably look in vain in it for any reference to the Battle of Patay; you shall certainly find Agincourt noised and trumpted ad lib. Now battles are never decisive; they never make history; the very best of them might just as well not have been fought.  But at Patay the forces which made it inevitable France should be a nation struck down into the physical plane and made themselves manifest:  as far as that plane is concerned, the centuries of French history flow from the battlefield of Patay.  But what made trumpery Agincourt was only the fierce will of a cruel, ambitious fighting king; and what flowed from it was a few decades of war and misery.  That by way of illustration how history is envisaged and taught:  depend upon it, by every people; it is not peculiar to this one or that.—­Well then, the fish we are at liberty to catch in this particular Roman pool is a period during which Rome was part of the Etruscan Empire.

The fact is generally accepted, I believe; and is, of course, the proposition we started from.  How long the period was, we cannot say.  The Tarquins were from Tarquinii in Etruria; perhaps a line of Etruscan governors.  The gentleman from Clusium who swore by the Nine Gods was either a king who brought back a rebellious Rome to temporary submission, or the last Etruscan monarch in whose empire it was included.  But here is the point:  whether fifty or five hundred years long—­and perhaps more likely the former than the latter—­this period of foreign rule was long enough to make a big break in the national tradition, and to throw all preceding events out of perspective.

At the risk of longueurs—­and other things—­let me take an illustration from scenes I know.  I have heard peasants in Wales talking about events before the conquest;—­people who have never learnt Welsh history out of books, and have nothing to go on but local legends;—­and placing the old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago at “over a hundred years back, I shouldn’ wonder.”  It is the way of tradition to foreshorten things like that,—­Nothing much has happened in Wales since those ancient battles with the English; so the six or seven centuries of English rule are dismissed as “over a hundred years.”  Rome under the Etruscans, like Wales under the English, would have had no history of her own:  there would have been nothing to impress itself on the race-memory.  Such times