Herodotus, certainly, never forgets for long that history is a fable. That wonderful anecdote of Gyges and the infatuated King who compelled him to hide behind the door and to look on the Queen when she was naked, with the result that the Queen on discovering him, ordered him to kill the King and marry her or die himself, is not a mere unrelated scene as from a ballet, but has its tragic signature five generations later, when the power of Crœsus, the descendant of Gyges, is destroyed and he is a prisoner in the camp of Cyrus. Crœsus, being unable to understand how the disaster had happened, obtained permission from Cyrus to send messengers to Delphi to enquire of the Oracle why it had deceived him. And the priestess replied: “None may escape his destined lot, not even a god. Crœsus hath paid for the sin of his ancestor of the fifth generation: who, being of the guard of the Heraclidæ, was led by the guile of a woman to slay his master, and took to himself the royal state of that master, whereto he had no right.” We find in pagan literature a sense of the divine government of the world that is missing from the greater part of modern Christian literature. The pagan historians, I think, have a profounder sense of sin and of the sufferings that result from sin than most of the Christian historians. Nowadays, we hesitate before allowing even Richard III or Judge Jeffreys to have been a sinner. And, as we have found no substitute for those ancient colours of vice and virtue, much of our history is colourless and uninteresting. The sense of sin is of infinite value to an artist, if only because it enables him to see how striking are the contrasts that exist in every human being. He sees the great man as a miserable sinner, and he sees him all the more truthfully for this. He sees the beautiful woman as a miserable sinner, and he sees her all the more truthfully for this. Aristotle, indeed, thought that it was impossible to write great tragic literature except about a noble character who was seen to be a sinner. It was probably never done till the appearance of the Gospels, and I am not sure whether it has been done since. Shakespeare had as compassionate a sense of the flaw in human nature even at its greatest as the Greek dramatists and the supreme Greek biographer. There is, no doubt, a school of writers who have so keen a sense of the flaws that they can see scarcely anything else. This is inimical to art. Suetonius provides us with a feast of flaws, from which we rise with the feeling that we have been dining on spiced and putrid dishes. His was not a disinterested observation of human character. He was a specialist in the vices. It is appalling to think what he would have made of Sempronia, one of the many Roman ladies whom Catiline enticed into his conspiracy. Sallust’s portrait of her is a masterpiece: