If this book fulfils in any degree the intention of its author, its tendency will be to encourage readers to keep open the channels of their national traditions and to scrutinize contemporary literature in the light of their national past. I am aware of the current feeling that no national past will bear scrutiny. At the present time, there appears to be no "popular" nation anywhere in the world, and the feelings with which many people regard any encouragement of "nationalistic sentiment," either at home or abroad, are as curiously mixed as those which the ancients entertained towards the daughter of Tyndareus, that beautiful and dangerous woman whose fame has outlasted all their empires.
The old bard Stesichorus, we are told, for reviling Helen was stricken blind; but he afterwards "unsaid all the evil he had sung of her," and accepted a legendary account according to which Helen was never actually in Troy but only her phantasm, while she herself, miraculously transported to Egypt, there awaited the return of her lord. Euripides based his Helen upon this story.
Virgil's treatment of the character exhibits the same sense of a perilous impiety in any attempt to
