Draw a veil o'er the rout when advances great Cyrus of Elam,
Dusky-browed archers behind him, and spearmen before,
When he cries 'Strike!' and the gorgeously inlaid pavements
Run ruddy with blood of the festive Assyrians there.

VII.--_Greece and Rome._--My female readers, whom only I contemplate in
every line of this little work, and who would have a right to consider
it disrespectful if I were to leave a single word of Latin or Greek
unexplained, must understand that the Greeks, according to that
universal habit of viewing remote objects in a relation of ascent or
descent with respect to the observer, whence the 'going up to
Jerusalem,' and our own 'going up to London,' always figured a journey
eastwards, that is, directed towards the Euphrates or Tigris, or to any
part of Asia from Greece as tending _upwards_. In this mode of
conceiving their relations to the East, they were governed
semi-consciously by the sense of a vast presence beyond the
Tigris--glorified by grandeur and by distance--the golden city of Susa,
and the throne of the great king. Accordingly, the expedition therefore
of Cyrus the younger against his brother Artaxerxes was called by
Xenophon, when recording it, the Anabasis, or going up of Cyrus; and,
from the accident of its celebrity, this title has adhered to that
expedition; and to that book--as if either could claim it by some
exclusive title; whereas, on the contrary, the Katabasis, or going down,
furnishes by much the larger and the more interesting part of the work.
And, in any case, the title is open to all Asiatic expeditions
whatsoever; to the Trojan that just crossed the water, to the Macedonian
that went beyond the Indus. The word Anabasis must have its accent on
the syllable _ab_, not on the penultimate syllable _as_.

In coming to the history of Imperial Rome, one is fortunately made
sensible at once of a vast advantage, which is this--that one is not
throwing away one's labour. Sad it is, after ploughing a stiff and
difficult clay, to find all at once that the whole is a task of so
little promise that perhaps, on the whole, one might as well have left
it untouched.

X. Yes, I remember that my cousin, Cecilia Dinbury, took the pains to
master--or perhaps one ought to say to _mistress_--the history.

L. No, to _miss_ it, is what one ought to say.

X. Fie, my dear second cousin--Fie, fie, if you please. To _miss_ it,
indeed! Ah, how we wished that we _had_ missed it. But