fade out easily:  they seem to have been very short, or are forgotten altogether.  But this same Welsh peasant, who thus forgets and foreshortens recent history, always remembers that there were kings of Wales once.  Perhaps, if he were put to it to write a history, with no books to guide him, he would name you as many as seven of them, and supply each with more or less true stories.  In reality, of course, there were eight centuries of Welsh kings; and before them, the Roman occupation,—­which he also remembers, but very vaguely; and before that, he has the strongest impression that there were ages of wide sovereignty and splendor.  The kings he would name, naturally, are the ones that made the most mark.—­I think the Romans, in constructing or making Greeks construct for them their ancient history, did very much the same kind of thing.  They remembered the names of seven kings, with tales about them, and built on those.  There were the kings who had stood out and stood for most; and the Romans remembered what they stood for.  So here I think we get real history; whereas in the stories of republican days we may see the efforts of great families to provide themselves with a great past.  But I doubt we could take anything aupied de la lettre; or that it would profit us to do so if we could.  Here is a pointer:  we have seen how in India a long age of Kshattriya supremacy preceded the supremacy of the Brahmins.  Now observe Kshattriya Romulus followed by Brahmin Numa.

I do not see why Madame Blavatsky shold have so strongly insisted on the truth of the story of the roman Kings unless there were more in it than mere pralayic historicity.  Unless it were of bigger value, that is, than Andorran or Montenegrin annals.  Rome, after the Etruscan domination, was a meanly built little city; but there were remains from pre-Etruscan times greater than anything built under the Republic.  Rome is a fine modern capital now; but there were times in the age of papal rule, when it was a miserable depopulated village of great ruins, with wolves prowling nightly through the weed-grown streets.  Yet even then the tradition of Roma Caput Mundi reigned among the wretched inhabitants,—­witness Rienzi:  it was the one thing, besides the ruins, to tell of ancient greatness.  Some such feeling, borne down out of a forgotten past, impelled Republican Rome on the path of conquest.  It was not even a tradition, at that time; but the essence of a tradition that remained as a sense of high destinies.

Who, then, was Romulus?—­Some king’s son from Ruta or Daitya, who came in his lordly Atlantean ships, and builded a city on the Tiber?  Very likely.  That would be, at the very least, as far back as nine or ten thousand B.C.; which is contemptibly modern, when you think of the hundred and sixty thousand years of our present sub-race.  The thing that is in the back of my mind is, that Rome is probably as old as that sub-race, or nearly so; but wild horses