drawn from civilized life.

One sees the same thing in the old Welsh Romances: tales from of
old retold by men fired with immense racial hopes, with a view to
fostering such hopes in the minds of their hearers. The bards
saw about them the rude life and disunion of the Welsh, and the
far greater outward culture of the Normans; and their stock in
trade was a tradition of ancient and half-magical Welsh grandeur.
When they wrote of Cai--Sir Kay the Seneschal--that so subtle was
his nature that when it pleased him he could make himself as tall
as the tallest tree in the forest, they were dealing in a purely
celtic element: the tradition of the greatness of, and the
magical powers inherent in, the human spirit; but when they set
him on horseback, to ride tilts in the tourney ring, they were
simply borrowing from, to out do, the Normans. Material culture,
as they saw it, included those things; therefore they ascribed
them to the old culture they were trying to paint.

Lying was traditionally a Greek vice. The Greek lied as
naturally as the Persian told the truth. Homer wishes to set
forth Ulysses, one of his heroes, adorned with all heroic
perfections. He was so far Greek as not to think of lying as a
quality to detract; he proudly makes Ulysses a "lord of lies."
Perhaps nothing in Crete itself would have taught him better; if
we may believe Epimenides and Saint Paul. On the other hand, he
was a great-hearted and compassionate man; compassionate as
Shakespeare was. Now the position of women in historical Greece
was very low indeed; the position of women in Egypt, as we know,
was very high indeed. This was a question to touch such a man to
the quick; the position he gives women is very high: very much