ng mountaineer and
his playmates, whom he makes his generals and satraps, sweep onward
towards the West, teaching their men the art of riding, till the Persian
cavalry becomes more famous than the Median had been. They gather to
them, as a snow-ball gathers in rolling, the picked youth of every tribe
whom they overcome. They knit these tribes to them in loyalty and
affection by that righteousness--that truthfulness and justice--for which
Isaiah in his grandest lyric strains has made them illustrious to all
time; which Xenophon has celebrated in like manner in that exquisite book
of his--the _Cyropaedia_. The great Lydian kingdom of Croesus--Asia
Minor as we call it now--goes down before them. Babylon itself goes
down, after that world-famed siege which ended in Belshazzar's feast; and
when Cyrus died--still in the prime of life, the legends seem to say--he
left a coherent and well-organised empire, which stretched from the
Mediterranean to Hindostan.

So runs the tale, which to me, I confess, sounds probable and rational
enough. It may not do so to you; for it has not to many learned men.
They are inclined to 'relegate it into the region of myth;' in plain
English, to call old Herodotus a liar, or at least a dupe. What means
those wise men can have at this distance of more than 2000 years, of
knowing more about the matter than Herodotus, who lived within 100 years
of Cyrus, I for myself, cannot discover. And I say this without the
least wish to disparage these hypercritical persons. For there are--and
more there ought to be, as long as lies and superstitions remain on this
earth--a class of thinkers who hold in just suspicion all stories which
savour of the sensational, the romantic, even the dramatic. They know
the terrible uses to which appeals to the fancy and the emotions have
been applied, and are still applied to enslave the intellects, the
consciences, the very bodies of men and women. They dread so much from
experience the abuse of that formula, that a thing is so beautiful it
must be true, that they are inclined to reply, 'Rather let us say boldly,
it is so beautiful that it cannot be true. Let us mistrust, or even
refuse to believe _a priori_, and at first sight, all startling,
sensational, even poetic tales, and accept nothing as history, which is
not as dull as the ledger of a dry goods' store.' But I think that
experience, both in nature and in society, are against that ditch-water
philosophy.