had been revealed by an angel to the first and greatest of
the Constantines, with a sacred injunction, that this gift of Heaven,
this peculiar blessing of the Romans, should never be communicated to
any foreign nation; that the prince and the subject were alike bound to
religious silence under the temporal and spiritual penalties of treason
and sacrilege; and that the impious attempt would provoke the sudden
and supernatural vengeance of the God of the Christians. By these
precautions, the secret was confined, above four hundred years, to the
Romans of the East; and at the end of the eleventh century, the Pisans,
to whom every sea and every art were familiar, suffered the effects,
without understanding the composition, of the Greek fire. It was at
length either discovered or stolen by the Mahometans; and, in the holy
wars of Syria and Egypt, they retorted an invention, contrived against
themselves, on the heads of the Christians. A knight, who despised the
swords and lances of the Saracens, relates, with heartfelt sincerity,
his own fears, and those of his companions, at the sight and sound of
the mischievous engine that discharged a torrent of the Greek fire, the
_feu Gregeois_, as it is styled by the more early of the French
writers. It came flying through the air, says Joinville, like a winged
long-tailed dragon, about the thickness of a hogshead, with the report
of thunder and the velocity of lightning; and the darkness of the night
was dispelled by this deadly illumination. The use of the Greek, or, as
it might now be called, of the Saracen fire, was continued to the middle
of the fourteenth century, when the scientific or casual compound of
nitre, sulphur, and charcoal, effected a new revolution in the art of
war and the history of mankind.

Chapter LII: More Conquests By The Arabs.--Part II.

Constantinople and the Greek fire might exclude the Arabs from the
eastern entrance of Europe; but in the West, on the side of the
Pyrenees, the provinces of Gaul were threatened and invaded by the
conquerors of Spain. The decline of the French monarchy invited the
attack of these insatiate fanatics. The descendants of Clovis had
lost the inheritance of his martial and ferocious spirit; and their
misfortune or demerit has affixed the epithet of _lazy_ to the last
kings of the Merovingian race. They ascended the throne without power,
and sunk into the grave without a name. A country palace, in the
neighborhood of Comp