eyelids stained with antimony, living a womanlike life, shut up from all
his subjects in the recesses of a vast seraglio.

He calls together the mountain rulers; makes friends with Tigranes, an
Armenian prince, a vassal of the Mede, who has his wrongs likewise to
avenge. And the two little armies of foot-soldiers--the Persians had no
cavalry--defeat the innumerable horsemen of the Mede, take the old king,
keep him in honourable captivity, and so change, one legend says, in a
single battle, the fortunes of the whole East.

And then begins that series of conquests of which we know hardly
anything, save the fact that they were made. The young mountaineer and
his playmates, whom he makes his generals and satraps, sweep onward
towards the West, teaching their men the art of riding, till the Persian
cavalry becomes more famous than the Median had been. They gather to
them, as a snowball gathers in rolling, the picked youth of every tribe
whom they overcome. They knit these tribes to them in loyalty and
affection by that righteousness--that truthfulness and justice--for which
Isaiah in his grandest lyric strains has made them illustrious to all
time; which Xenophon has celebrated in like manner in that exquisite book
of his--the "Cyropaedia." The great Lydian kingdom of Croesus--Asia
Minor as we call it now--goes down before them. Babylon itself goes
down, after that world-famed siege which ended in Belshazzar's feast; and
when Cyrus died--still in the prime of life, the legends seem to say--he
left a coherent and well-organised empire, which stretched from the
Mediterranean to Hindostan.

So runs the tale, which to me, I confess, sounds probable and rational
enough. It may not do so to you; for it has not to many learned men.
They are inclined to "relegate it into the region of myth;" in plain