Rome would never have been the mistress of the world, had it not been for the heroic impetus generated in the events which marked her earliest annals. Even if we are driven to regard these as in a great measure mythical, they still, in the highest and most valid sense, belong to Roman history, and all the efforts of Niebuhr and of Arnold have failed, and ever will fail, to divest them of the rank they have heretofore maintained among the formative influences in the Roman character. They entered into the national memory. They formed for ages the richest and most suggestive part of the national thinking. They became thus more really and vitally incorporated into the national being than many events whose historical authenticity no critic has ever called in question. But we can not believe them wholly or even mainly mythical. Some of the more modern theories on this subject will have to be re-examined. With all their plausibility they are open to the objection of presenting the mightiest effects without adequate or corresponding causes. Twelve hundred years of empire, such as that of Rome, could not well have had its origin in any period marked by events less strangely grand and chivalrous than those that Livy has recorded. Brutus, and Cincinnatus, and Fabricius, must have been as real as the splendid reality which could only have grown out of so heroic an ancestry. The spirit of Numa more truly ruled, even in the later Roman empire, than did ever that of Augustus. It was yet powerful in the days of Constantine. It was still present in that desperate struggle which made it difficult, even for a Christian senate, to cast out the last vestiges of the old religion, and to banish the Goddess of Victory from the altars and temples she had so long occupied. A similar view, drawn from the Jewish history, must commend itself to every one who has even an ordinary knowledge of the Scriptures. The glorious deliverances from Egyptian bondage, the sublime reminiscences of Sinai, the heroic, as exhibited in Moses, and Joshua, and Jephthah, and Gideon, are ever reappearing in the Hebrew prophetic and lyrical poetry. These proud recollections cheer them in the long years of the captivity. Even in the latest and most debasing periods of their history, they impart an almost superhuman energy to their struggle with Rome; and what is more than all, after having sustained the Jewish song, and the Jewish eloquence, during ages of depressing conflict, their influence is still felt in all the noblest departments of Christian art and Christian literature.