Yet this is not easy when we stand face to face with the wonderful performances of this undying race. What have the Greeks not accomplished on the stage of the world’s history since they accepted the heritage of the older and richer civilisations? First they dominated and so far absorbed the pre-existing population as to feel themselves the only possessors of the country. Some of them even boasted, and without raising any controversy, that they were indigenous to that soil. Then they spread themselves over all the Mediterranean coast, beginning with Asia Minor, where they collided with the successive empires of Mesopotamia. They went to Italy and Sicily, which became Greek lands, so far as they were civilised, and then they successfully resisted the great effort of the Persian Empire to make them a subject province. Even their Asiatic brethren, who did fall under Persian sway for several generations, never lost their nationality, nor could they be said to have resumed it again when the Persian Empire fell under Macedonian sway. When the Hellenic nationality came to dominate the kingdoms of Macedonia, hither Asia, and Egypt, and even when the Romans supervened, who treated it first with respect, presently with contempt, these arrogant conquerors could never shake off the spiritual domination of Greek literature, Greek philosophy, Greek art, and Greek urbanity. Nay, so imperishable was the Greek influence that it caused a new boundary line to be drawn between East and West, and founded on the old Greek Byzantium a new capital, where Hellenic refinement and Hellenic art were still to all the ruder Western world the acme of dignity and of splendour. Even when this magnificence had been plundered by barbarous crusaders, and again by less barbarous Turks, the fugitive handful of learned Greeks, with their immortal heritage of letters, lit up an intellectual flame in Western Europe that has never since been quenched.