Certainly, it is necessary to transpose the facts, the frame, the actors. It is necessary to lower the historical ladder to the rung of anecdote, but the quality of soul, does it not remain the same? Setting aside all that modern civilisation has added or taken away from the manner of thinking, of living and of feeling in the third century, we may say that, if we invert the parts, if we make Hester Stanhope ascend the throne of Palmyra (she would have very much enjoyed that position), if we make Zenobia descend to the tent of the English traveller, they are not misplaced. Hester Stanhope, would she not have deserved the praise of Aurelian writing of Zenobia, after having crushed at Antioch and at Emesa the heavy Palmyrian cavalry, the archers of Osrhoene and those impetuous bands of Arabs called so justly the brigands of Syria: "I should prefer for my glory and my safety to deal with a man," she whose implacable hostility and proud resistance were to make Mahomet Ali and Ibrahim Pacha remark, twenty years later, that "the Englishwoman had given them more trouble to conquer than all the insurgents of Syria and Palestine." Zenobia, shut up in Palmyra, besieged by the Roman legions who were digging mines to shake the solid ramparts at the angles crowned by towers, replied proudly to Aurelian, who offered her life in return for the surrender of the town: "No one before thee has made in writing such a demand. In war, one obtains nothing save by courage. You tell me to surrender, as if you did not know that Queen Cleopatra preferred death to all the dignities which they promised her. The help of Persia will not fail me. I have on my side the Saracens and the Armenians. Conquered already by the brigands of Syria, Aurelian, wouldst thou be able to resist the troops which are expected from all parts? Then without doubt will fall that ridiculous pride which dares to order me to surrender, as if victory could not escape thee." Lady Hester would willingly have signed this letter of which the biting tone and the emphatic turn would not have displeased her. And when Lady Hester, grown old, without soldiers, without money, in her ruined castle of the Lebanon, engaged in a savage and perpetual struggle with her terrible enemy, the Emir Bechir, will cry to an officer who was laying down his pistols and his sabre at the door of Tier room: "Take up thine arms! Dost thou think then that I am afraid of thee or thy master? I do not know what fear is. It is for him and those who serve him to tremble. And let not his son the Emir Khalil dare to place his foot here. I will kill him; it will not be my people who will shoot him; I will kill him myself with my own hand"; is it not easy to imagine that Zenobia would have used the same violence of language? And of which might a biographer have written: "Her chastity was vaunted like her courage and she knew not love save for glory." Of Zenobia or of Lady Hester?