religious; for primaeval art is the handmaid of religion; historic
representation and political portraiture belong generally to a later
age. We cannot tell with certainty even that the original statue was
Roman: it may have been brought to Rome among the spoils of some
conquered city, in which case it would have no reference to Roman
history at all. We must banish it entirely from our minds, with all the
associations and impressions which cling to it, and we must do the same
with regard to the whole of that circle of legends woven out of
misinterpreted monuments or customs, with the embellishments of pure
fancy, which grouped itself round the apocryphal statues of the seven
kings in the Capitol, aptly compared by Arnold to the apocryphal
portraits of the early kings of Scotland in Holyrood and those of the
mediaeval founders of Oxford in the Bodleian. We must clear our minds
altogether of these fictions; they are not even ancient: they came into
existence at a time when the early history of Rome was viewed in the
deceptive light of her later achievements; when, under the influence of
altered circumstances, Roman sentiment had probably undergone a
considerable change; and when, consequently, the national imagination no
longer pointed true to anything primaeval.

Race, when tribal peculiarities are once formed, is a most important
feature in history; those who deny this and who seek to resolve
everything, even in advanced humanity, into the influence of external
circumstances or of some particular external circumstance, such as food,
are not less one-sided or less wide of the truth than those who employ
race as the universal solution. Who can doubt that between the English
and the French, between the Scotch and the Irish, there are differences
of character which have profoundly affected and still affect the course
of history? The case is still stronger if we take races more remote from
each other, such as the English and the Hindoo. But the further we