Mosscrop chuckled. “Oh, but you must make allowances for the period. It was the Renaissance, the joyful, exuberant, devil-may-care Renaissance. If once you catch the inner spirit of it, you will feel that it was the most glorious of periods. And Francis the First was the living, breathing type of it. There was a man for you! He celebrated _his_ birthday all the year round. And in this particular instance, why, I daresay it was the Duchess’s birthday too. I should have thought you would take a more lenient view of such a pleasing double anniversary.” Vestalia looked doubtfully at him. “I hope you don’t mean that _I_ am in my cups, as you call it,” she said. He laughed her suspicion down. “No, I won’t let you hint at such an absurd thing. My dear friend, I must cultivate your sense of humour. The roots exist, but the growth is choked by the weeds of Lambeth--or was it Kennington? We must have them up.” “But I don’t know _when_ you are joking,” she protested. “Besides, I always understood that the Scotch were not a joking people.” “Ah, you confuse two things. It is said of us, with some justice, that we are slow to comprehend the jokes of others. But of the making of jokes by ourselves there is no end. And--ah, here is Nero. I love Nero!” “Is that a joke, too?” “Ah, no,” he answered, more seriously. “It is in my nature to love all the people whom history has picked out to condemn. If you knew the sort of creatures who wrote the histories--the old chronicles and records and so on--you would understand my point of view. They were full of all meannesses and narrow bigotries; they calumniated everybody they couldn’t blackmail. Take the case of Richard Lionheart and his brother John, in your own English history. The former was a ferocious and turbulent blackguard, who neglected all his duties of kingship without shame, plundered his own subjects by torture and rapine, and was altogether a curse to his own people and everybody else. The mere trick of his having a taste for songs and music saved him. He buttered up the bards, and they fastened him in history as a hero. It is precisely the same thing that is done now by politicians who take pains to make friends with the newspapers. On the other hand, John was a model monarch, diligent, hardworking, extraordinarily attentive to his duties, travelling for ever up and down the country to hold courts of justice, and right the wrongs poor people suffered at the hands of the barons and the abbots and other powerful ruffians. It is plain enough that the poor people loved him; after all these centuries his name continues to be the most popular baptismal name among them. But the bards and monkish chroniclers were in the pay of the barons and abbots, and they paint John for us as the most evil scoundrel in English history. That’s the way it has always been done. I should like to have Nero’s side of his story. I know he must have been a splendid fellow, to have got the historians so violently against him.