In a small chest which he had not opened before he found, to his great delight, a number of books, all the plays of Shakespeare, several by Beaumont and Fletcher, others by Congreve and Marlowe, Monsieur Rollin's Ancient History, a copy of Telemachus, translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, Ovid, Horace, Virgil and other classics. Most of the books looked as if they had been read and he thought they might have belonged to the captain, but there was no inscription in any of them, and, on the other hand, they might have been taken from a captured ship. With plenty of leisure and a mind driven in upon itself, Robert now read a great deal, and, as little choice was left to him, he read books that he might have ignored otherwise. Moreover, he thought well upon what he read. It seemed to him as he went over his Homer again and again that the gods were cruel. Men were made weak and fallible, and then they were punished because they failed or erred. The gods themselves were not at all exempt from the sins, or, rather, mistakes for which they punished men. He felt this with a special force when he read his Ovid. He thought, looking at it in a direct and straight manner, that Niobe had a right to be proud of her children, and for Apollo to slay them because of that pride was monstrous. His mind also rebelled at his Virgil. He did not care much for the elderly lover, AEneas, who fled from Carthage and Dido, and when AEneas and his band came to Italy his sympathies were largely with Turnus, who tried to keep his country and the girl that really belonged to him. He was quite sure that something had been wrong in the mind of Virgil and that he ought to have chosen another kind of hero. Shakespeare, whom he had been compelled to read at school, he now read of his own accord, and he felt his romance and poetry. But he lingered longer over the somewhat prosy ancient history of Monsieur Rollin. His imaginative mind did not need much of a hint to attempt the reconstruction of old empires. But he felt that always in them too much depended upon one man. When an emperor fell an empire fell, when a king was killed a kingdom went down. He applied many of the lessons from those old, old wars to the great war that was now raging, and he was confirmed in his belief that England and her colonies would surely triumph. The French monarchy, to judge from all that he had heard, was now in the state of one of those old oriental monarchies, decayed and rotten, spreading corruption from a poisoned center to all parts of the body. However brave and tenacious the French people might be, and he knew that none were more so, he was sure they could not prevail over the strength of free peoples like those who fought under the British flag, free to grow, whatever their faults might be. So, old Monsieur Rollin, who had brought tedium to many, brought refreshment and courage to Robert.