long. Nevertheless, she was a woman of no mean endowments; she could write verses, bandy jests, and use language which was modest, or tender, or wanton; in fine, she possessed a high degree of wit and charm.

A miserable sinner, undoubtedly. How odious and how interesting!

But, even as gossips, how these ancient historians still keep their hold on us! Herodotus is the father of nursery tales as well as of moral tales. His account of Egypt in the second book of his history may appeal to the anthropologist in some of us; it also appeals to the child in all of us. He must have omitted thousands of the stories that he heard on his travels, but he had a genius for finding room for the interesting story. His pages are rich in attractive stories like that which tells how Psammetichus decided whether the Egyptians or the Phrygians were the oldest nation:

Now before Psammetichus became king of Egypt, the Egyptians deemed themselves to be the oldest nation on earth. . . . Psammetichus, being nowise able to discover by enquiry what men had first come into being, devised a plan whereby he took two new-born children of common men and gave them to a shepherd to bring up among his flock. He gave charge that none should speak any word in their hearing; they were to lie by themselves in a lonely hut, and in due season the shepherd was to bring

goats and give the children their milk and do all else needful. Psammetichus did this, and gave this charge, because he desired to hear what speech would first break from the children, when they were past the age of indistinct babbling. And he had his wish; for, when the shepherd had done as he was bidden for two years, one day as he opened the door and entered, both the children. ran to him, stretching out their hands and calling "Bekos." When he first heard this he said nothing of it; but coming often and taking careful note, he was ever hearing this same word, till at last he told the matter to his master, and on command brought the children into the King's presence. Psammetichus heard them himself, and enquired to what language this word "Bekos" might belong; he found it to be a Phrygian word signifying bread. Reasoning from this fact the Egyptians confessed that the Phrygians were older than they.

Scientific? Perhaps not. And yet science and art may embrace in the recording of such stories as this. But it is in the museum of the arts, not in that of the sciences, that Herodotus holds his immortal place. He may not be the first of the scientific historians: he is certainly the first of the European masters of the art of entertaining prose.

XIII

A WORDSWORTH DISCOVERY A good many people were pleased-not without malice-when Professor Harper discovered a few years ago that Wordsworth had an illegitimate daughter. It was like hearing a piece of scandal about an archbishop. As a matter of fact, the story, as Professor Harper tells it, is not a scandal; it is merely a puzzle. The figures in the episode are names and shadows: we know almost nothing as regards their feelings for each other or what it was that prevented the lovers from marrying. Professor Harper believes that Wordsworth has left a disguised version of the story in Vaudracour and Julia. Wordsworth himself says of Vaudracour and Julia that "the facts are true," and the main "facts" in the poem are that the lovers wish to marry, cannot gain their parent's consent, and give way to passion, and that after this their parents, instead of softening in their attitude, insist more harshly

than ever on keeping them apart. Wordsworth is vehement in his contention that Vaudracour was no common seducer yielding to the lusts of the flesh, and the suggestion is fairly clear that the youth thought he was taking the only way to make marriage inevitable. Consider these lines, which impute honourable motives, if not honourable conduct, to the lover:

So passed the time, till whether through effect
Of some unguarded moment that dissolved
Virtuous restraint-ah, speak it, think it, not!
Deem rather that the fervent youth, who saw
So many bars between his present state
And the dear haven where he wished to be
In honourable wedlock with his love,
Was in his judgment tempted to decline

To perilous weakness, and entrust his cause

To nature for a happy end of all;

Deem that by such fond hope the youth was swayed
And bear with their transgression, when I add
That Julia, wanting yet the name of wife,
Carried about her for a secret grief,

The promise of a mother.

These lines have an ethical rather than a poetical interest. Whether Wordsworth, in writing them, was consciously or subconsciously attempting his own moral justification, we do not know. But Professor Harper has collected a number of facts

that make it appear likely that he was. Certainly, the story of Wordsworth and Marie-Anne Vallon at Orleans in 1792, so far as we know it, might without violence be dramatised as the story of Vaudracour and Julia.

Bear in mind, for example, the "many bars" that stood in the way of Wordsworth's marriage to Marie-Anne, or "Annette," Vallon. They were not, as in the poem, barriers of class, but they were the equally insurmountable barriers of creed, both political and religious. Wordsworth was a young Englishman, full of the ardour of the Revolution, and a Protestant of so sceptical a cast that Coleridge described him as a "semi-atheist." Annette, for her part, was the child of parents who were zealots in the cause of Royalism and Catholicism. They must have regarded the coming of such a suitor as Wordsworth with the same horror with which a reader of the Morning Post would learn that his daughter had fallen in love with a Catholic Sinn Feiner or a Jewish Bolshevist. The position was even more bitter than this suggests. The sectarian and political passions that raged in France were more comparable to the passions of Orange Belfast than to any that can be imagined in the atmosphere of modern England. Wordsworth may well have appeared to these orthodox par