e Confessor, the rex Anglorum to whom they are
addressed. Nor is this date affected by the opinion, or rather mistake,
of Pasquier (Recherches de la France, l. vii. c. 2) and Ducange,
(Glossar. Latin.) The practice of rhyming, as early as the viith
century, was borrowed from the languages of the North and East,
(Muratori, Antiquitat. tom. iii. dissert. xl. p. 686-708.)]

[Footnote 51: The description of Amalphi, by William the Apulian, (l.
iii. p. 267,) contains much truth and some poetry, and the third line
may be applied to the sailor's compass:--

Nulla magis locuples argento, vestibus, auro

Partibus innumeris: hac plurimus urbe moratur

Nauta maris Caelique vias aperire peritus.

Huc et Alexandri diversa feruntur ab urbe

Regis, et Antiochi. Gens haec freta plurima transit.

His Arabes, Indi, Siculi nascuntur et Afri.

Haec gens est totum proore nobilitata per orbem,

Et mercando forens, et amans mercata referre.]

[Footnote 5111: Amalfi had only one thousand inhabitants at the
commencement of the 18th century, when it was visited by Brenckmann,
(Brenckmann de Rep. Amalph. Diss. i. c. 23.) At present it has six or
eight thousand Hist. des Rep. tom. i. p. 304.--G.]

Chapter LVI: The Saracens, The Franks And The Normans.--Part III.

Roger, the twelfth and last of the sons of Tancred, had been long
detained in Normandy by his own and his father' age. He accepted the
welcome summons; hastened to the Apulian camp; and deserved at first the
esteem, and afterwards the envy, of his elder brother. Their valor and
ambition were equal; but the youth, the beauty, the elegant manners,
of Roger engaged the disinterested love of the soldiers and people.
So scanty was his allowance for himself and forty followers, that he
descended from conquest to robbery, and from robbery to domestic theft;
and so loose were the notions of property, that, by his own historian,
at his special command, he is accused of stealing horses from a stable
at Melphi. [52] His spirit emerged from poverty and disgrace: from these
base practices he rose to the merit and glory of a holy war; and the
invasion of Sicily was seconded by the zeal and policy of his brother
Guiscard. After the retreat of the Greeks, the idolaters, a most
audacious reproach of the Catholics, had retrieved their losses and
possessions; but the deliverance of the island, so vainly undertaken by
the forces of the Eastern empir