“Dear me!” they said to one another. “What a
collection! Do you think we could get inside and see it properly?”
They waited till Clio went one day with Neptune to pay a visit to the Ethiopians “who lie in two halves, one half looking on to the Atlantic and the other on to the Indian Ocean,” they induced Vulcan to come and pick the lock for them and soon they were roaming all over the palace.
“How admirably arranged!” exclaimed one of them.
“It must be nearly exhaustive!” said another.
“Observe the collateral placing of remarkable persons and events,” said a third.
“One could find almost anything one wanted,” said a fourth.
“Ah!” they exclaimed; “oh! now if only we could manage to get a little life into some of these dead bones, how pleased Clio would be!”
They rifled the show-cases and carried off the most attractive details, each taking whatever pleased her best. They stole from Clio her transient facts and made them live again as their own by breathing into them the spirit of eternal truth and re-stating them in folk-lore, in tradition, in verse, in romance, in melody, in superstition, in outline, in colour, in modelling, in the movements of the dance; they set them up in libraries, in concert-rooms, in picture-galleries, in theatres, in churches, in corridors of sculpture, in the hearts of the people. This was not what Clio had intended; she was not at all pleased; she complained that her sisters had meddled, they had robbed her of her chief possessions and left the remainder in disorder; her collection no longer corresponded with the catalogue. In attempting to reconstruct she floundered into such blunders that the saying has come down to us: Blessed are the people that have no history, for they shall not be misrepresented.
Strictly speaking, of course, every man has history, such as it is, and the beatitude was intended to refer only to those whose history has escaped the attention of the muses