On page 284 even the most superficial student of antiquity will be astonished to hear that it was the Roman unity which so weakened the Greek culture of the East as ultimately to subject it to barbarism under the Turks. He notes on the same page with horror that the Roman of the Republic had no maps of Germany, Russia, Africa, and Central Asia, and adds (of men like Cæsar) that “even if they had had maps they would not have had the intelligence to use them.” Talking of Julius Cæsar, one might have thought that _his_ really remarkable talents would emerge from Mr. Wells’s eagle view of the human plain below. But no! That great head is first presented to us as “bald and middle-aged”—two qualities which, it seems, destroy capacity. His affair with Cleopatra marks “the elderly sensualist or sentimentalist” (Mr. Wells remarks with an ascetic sternness, remarkable and novel in such a novelist, that he was fifty-four at the time). As for great-mindedness, the unfortunate man was suffering from “a common man’s megalomania” with “a record of scheming” which is “silly and shameful.” It will be seen from these few epithets, chosen at random from a bare twenty pages, what the effect upon Mr. Wells has been of his first acquaintance, late in life, with the Eternal City. There is only one reasonable adjective for such an attitude. It is ridiculous. Lack of proportion and lack of dignity in historical writing, when they are pushed to that extreme, are absurd. There was about the Roman Empire all that we know most offends our author—majesty, greatness, a connection with our ancient tradition, and order. Roman letters suggest the education of the gentry, and anything connected with the gentry is, in itself, enough to rouse our author to boiling-point. The Roman story is the great story of soldiers—and with the Soldier goes the Priest, two characters abhorrent to him. But behind it all, without a doubt, the ultimate source of these ineptitudes is reaction against the Catholic Church, which not only the name, but the fact of Rome, suggests to the ill-guided and insufficient pen here at work. The odd thing is that Mr. Wells does not hesitate to illustrate his account, and that his average reader (who, I fancy, looks more at illustrations than at the text) has, by even such a glimpse of nobility in architecture and statuary, the whole foolish railing discounted. Had Mr. Wells’s publishers been able to include and present in popular illustration to their readers, not only building and bust and statue, but also that great volume of verse and prose which is the soul of Rome—but of which Mr. Wells would understand nothing, even if he had been compelled to study it for years—the effect would be greater still.