Such are the criticisms passed, such the "historical difficulty." The culprits arraigned are fully alive to their perilous situation; nevertheless, they maintain the statement. The only thing which may perhaps here be objected to is, that the names of the two nations are incorrectly used. It may be argued that to refer to the remote ancestors and their descendants equally as "Greeks and Romans," is an anachronism as marked as would be the calling of the ancient Keltic Gauls, or the Insubres, Frenchmen. As a matter of fact this is true. But, besides the very plausible excuse that the names used were embodied in a private letter, written as usual in great haste, and which was hardly worthy of the honour of being quoted verbatim with all its imperfections, there may perhaps exist still weightier objections to calling the said people by any other name. One misnomer is as good as another; and to refer to old Greeks and Romans in a private letter as the old Hellenes from Hellas or Magna Graecia, and the Latins as from Latium, would have been, besides looking pedantic, just as incorrect as the use of the appellation noted, though it may have sounded, perchance, more "historical." The truth is that, like the ancestors of nearly all the Indo-Europeans (or shall we say Indo-Germanic Japhetidae?), the Greek and Roman sub-races mentioned have to be traced much farther back. Their origin must be carried far into the mists of that "prehistoric" period, that mythical age which inspires the modern historian with such a feeling of squeamishness that anything creeping out of its abysmal depths is sure to be instantly dismissed as a deceptive phantom, the mythos of an idle tale, or a later fable unworthy of serious notice. The Atlantean "old Greeks" could not be designated even as the Autochthones--a convenient term used to dispose of the origin of any people whose ancestry cannot be traced, and which, at any rate with the Hellenes, meant certainly more than simply "soil-born," or primitive aborigines; and yet the so-called fable of Deukalion and Pyrrha is surely no more incredible or marvelous than that of Adam and Eve--a fable that hardly a hundred years ago no one would have dared or even thought to question. And in its esoteric significance the Greek tradition is possibly more truly historical than many a so-called historical event during the period of the Olympiades, though both Hesiod and Homer may have failed to record the former in their epics. Nor could the Romans be referred to as the Umbro-Sabbellians, nor even as the Itali. Peradventure, had the historians learnt something more than they have of the Italian "Autochthones"--the Iapygians--one might have given the "old Romans" the latter name. But then there would be again that other difficulty: history knows that the Latin invaders drove before them, and finally cooped up, this mysterious and miserable race among the clefts of the Calabrian rocks, thus showing the absence of any