Charles Kingsley - Historical Lectures and Essays стр 6.

Let me try to prove my point, and end with a story, as I began with one.

It is just thirty years before the Norman conquest of England, the evening of the battle of Sticklestead.  St. Olafs corpse is still lying unburied on the hillside.  The reforming and Christian king has fallen in the attempt to force Christianity and despotism on the Conservative and half-heathen partythe free bonders or yeoman-farmers of Norway.  Thormod, his poetthe man, as his name means, of thunder moodwho has been standing in the ranks, at last has an arrow in his left side.  He breaks off the shaft, and thus sore wounded goes up, when all is lost, to a farm where is a great barn full of wounded.  One Kimbe comes, a man out of the opposite or bonder part.  There is great howling and screaming in there, he says.  King Olafs men fought bravely enough: but it is a shame brisk young lads cannot bear their wounds.  On what side wert thou in the fight?  On the best side, says the beaten Thormod.  Kimbe sees that Thormod has a good bracelet on his arm.  Thou art surely a kings man.  Give me thy gold ring and I will hide thee, ere the bonders kill thee.

Thormod said, Take it, if thou canst get it.  I have lost that which is worth more; and he stretched out his left hand, and Kimbe tried to take it.  But Thormod, swinging his sword, cut off his hand; and it is said Kimbe behaved no better over his wound than those he had been blaming.

Then Thormod went into the barn; and after he had sung his song there in praise of his dead king, he went into an inner room, where was a fire, and water warming, and a handsome girl binding up mens wounds.  And he sat down by the door; and one said to him, Why art thou so dead pale?  Why dost thou not call for the leech?  Then sung Thormod:

and so forth, improvising after the old Norse fashion.  Then Thormod got up and went to the fire, and stood and warmed himself.  And the nurse-girl said to him, Go out, man, and bring some of the split-firewood which lies outside the door.  He went out and brought an armful of wood and threw it down.  Then the nurse-girl looked him in the face, and said, Dreadful pale is this man.  Why art thou so?  Then sang Thormod:

The girl said, Let me see thy wound.  Then Thormod sat down, and the girl saw his wounds, and that which was in his side, and saw that there was a piece of iron in it; but could not tell where it had gone.  In a stone pot she had leeks and other herbs, and boiled them, and gave the wounded man of it to eat.  But Thormod said, Take it away; I have no appetite now for my broth.  Then she took a great pair of tongs and tried to pull out the iron; but the wound was swelled, and there was too little to lay hold of.  Now said Thormod, Cut in so deep that thou canst get at the iron, and give me the tongs.  She did as he said.  Then took Thormod the gold bracelet off his hand and gave it the nurse-girl, and bade her do with it what she liked.

It is a good mans gift, said he.  King Olaf gave me the ring this morning.

Then Thormod took the tongs and pulled the iron out.  But on the iron was a barb, on which hung flesh from the heart, some red, some white.  When he saw that, he said, The king has fed us well.  I am fat, even to the hearts roots.  And so leant back and was dead.

CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF-THE LORD 4

I wish to speak to you to-night about one of those old despotic empires which were in every case the earliest known form of civilisation.  Were I minded to play the cynic or the mountebank, I should choose some corrupt and effete despotism, already grown weak and ridiculous by its decayas did at last the Roman and then the Byzantine Empireand, after raising a laugh at the expense of the old system say: See what a superior people you are nowhow impossible, under free and enlightened institutions, is anything so base and so absurd as went on, even in despotic France before the Revolution of 1793.  Well, that would be on the whole true, thank God; but what need is there to say it?

Let us keep our scorn for our own weaknesses, our blame for our own sins, certain that we shall gain more instruction, though not more amusement, by hunting out the good which is in anything than by hunting out its evil.  I have chosen, not the worst, but the best despotism which I could find in history, founded and ruled by a truly heroic personage, one whose name has become a proverb and a legend, that so I might lift up your minds, even by the contemplation of an old Eastern empire, to see that it, too, could be a work and ordinance of God, and its hero the servant of the Lord.  For we are almost bound to call Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, by this august title for two reasonsFirst, because the Hebrew Scriptures call him so; the next, because he proved himself to be such by his actions and their consequencesat least in the eyes of those who believe, as I do, in a far-seeing and far-reaching Providence, by which all human history is

His work was very different from any that need be done, or can be done, in these our days.  But while we thank God that such work is now as unnecessary as impossible; we may thank God likewise that, when such work was necessary and possible, a man was raised up to do it: and to do it, as all accounts assert, better, perhaps, than it had ever been done before or since.

True, the old conquerors, who absorbed nation after nation, tribe after tribe, and founded empires on their ruins, are now, I trust, about to be replaced, throughout the world, as here and in Britain at home, by free self-governed peoples:

And that custom of conquest and empire and transplantation did more than once corrupt the world.  And yet in it, too, God may have more than once fulfilled His own designs, as He did, if Scripture is to be believed, in Cyrus, well surnamed the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire some 2400 years ago.  For these empires, it must be remembered, did at least that which the Roman Empire did among a scattered number of savage tribes, or separate little races, hating and murdering each other, speaking different tongues, and worshipping different gods, and losing utterly the sense of a common humanity, till they looked on the people who dwelt in the next valley as fiends, to be sacrificed, if caught, to their own fiends at home.  Among such as these, empires did introduce order, law, common speech, common interest, the notion of nationality and humanity.  They, as it were, hammered together the fragments of the human race till they had moulded them into one.  They did it cruelly, clumsily, ill: but was there ever work done on earth, however noble, which was notalas, alas!done somewhat ill?

Let me talk to you a little about the old hero.  He and his hardy Persians should be specially interesting to us.  For in them first does our race, the Aryan race, appear in authentic history.  In them first did our race give promise of being the conquering and civilising race of the future world.  And to the conquests of Cyrusso strangely are all great times and great movements of the human family linked to each otherto his conquests, humanly speaking, is owing the fact that you are here, and I am speaking to you at this moment.