uts."

Concerning these ingredients, my fellow-dramatist, Gilbert Murray, who,
as a Professor of Greek, has applied to classical antiquity the methods
of high scholarship (my own method is pure divination), writes to me as
follows: "Some of this I don't understand, and possibly Galen did not,
as he quotes your heroine's own language. Foam of nitre is, I think,
something like soapsuds. Reed bark is an odd expression. It might
mean the outside membrane of a reed: I do not know what it ought to be
called. In the burnt mice receipt I take that you first mixed the
solid powders with honey, and then added the grease. I expect Cleopatra
preferred it because in most of the others you have to lacerate the
skin, prick it, or rub it till it bleeds. I do not know what vine rag
is. I translate literally."

APPARENT ANACHRONISMS

The only way to write a play which shall convey to the general public an
impression of antiquity is to make the characters speak blank verse
and abstain from reference to steam, telegraphy, or any of the material
conditions of their existence. The more ignorant men are, the more
convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is
an apex which civilization and philosophy have painfully struggled up
the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery. Savagery, they think,
became barbarism; barbarism became ancient civilization; ancient
civilization became Pauline Christianity; Pauline Christianity became
Roman Catholicism; Roman Catholicism became the Dark Ages; and the Dark
Ages were finally enlightened by the Protestant instincts of the English
race. The whole process is summed up as Progress with a capital P. And
any elderly gentleman of Progressive temperament will testify that the
improvement since he was a boy is enormous.

Now if we count the generations of Progressive elderly gentlemen since,
say, Plato, and add together the successive enormous improvements
to which each of them has testified, it will strike us at once as an
unaccountable fact that the world, instead of having been improved in 67
generations out all recognition, presents, on the whole, a rather less
dignified appearance in Ibsen's Enemy of the People than in Plato's
Republic. And in truth, the period of time covered by history is far
too short to allow of any perceptible progress in the popular sense of
Evolution of the Human Species. The notion that there has been any such
Progress since Caesar's time (less than 20