That bids the Romans close.

* * * * *

And fliers and pursuers
Were mingled in a mass:
And far away the battle
Went roaring through the pass.

The scene of the following stanza is at Rome, where the watchers at
the gates have learned from the Great Twin Brethren the issue of the
day:

And all the people trembled,
And pale grew every cheek;
And Sergius, the High Pontiff,
Alone found voice to speak:
"The gods who live for ever
Have fought for Rome to-day!
These be the Great Twin Brethren
To whom the Dorians pray!"

Of course, we are not to be understood as intimating that Macaulay was
consciously or otherwise guilty of a plagiarism. Indeed, he was at
the pains, in his preface to the poem in question, to point out how
certain of its features were designedly taken, and others might fairly
be conceived to have been taken, from ballads of an age long before
Livy, whom he cites in the matter of the Great Twin Brethren. He has
even detailed a circumstance, in reference to the legendary appearance
of the divine warriors, curiously relevant to the resemblance just
pointed out. "In modern times," he wrote, "a very similar story
actually found credence among a people much more civilized than the
Romans of the fifth century before Christ. A chaplain of Cortez,
writing about thirty years after the conquest of Mexico, ... had the
face to assert that, in an engagement against the Indians, Saint James
had appeared on a gray horse at the head of the Castilian adventurers.
Many of those adventurers were living when this lie was printed. One
of them, honest Bernal Diaz, wrote an account of the expedition....
He says that he was in the battle, and that he saw a gray horse with
a man on his back, but that the man was, to his thinking, Francesco de
Morla, and not the ever-blessed apostle Saint James. 'Nevertheless,'
Bernal adds, 'it may be that the person on the gray horse was the
glorious apostle Saint James, and that I, sinner that I am, was
unworthy to see him.'" Other striking instances of identity between
classical, Castilian and Saxon legends are detailed by Lord Macaulay
in the learned and interesting general preface to his _Lays of Ancient
Rome_. But the reappearance of this particular story in such remote
times and places, and with such marked similarities and variations,
would entitle it to a place among the indestructible popular legends
collated by