ch heighten our interest in the fate which is hanging
over the city of Constantine. In 1425 the victorious Turks have
conquered all the Greek empire save the capital. Amurath II. besieged
it for two months, and was only prevented from taking it by a domestic
revolt in Asia Minor. At the end of his sixty-fifth chapter Gibbon
leaves Constantinople hanging on the brink of destruction, and paints
in glowing colours the military virtues of its deadly enemies, the
Ottomans. Then he interposes one of his most finished chapters, of
miscellaneous contents, but terminating in the grand and impressive
pages on the revival of learning in Italy. There we read of the
"curiosity and emulation of the Latins," of the zeal of Petrarch and
the success of Boccace in Greek studies, of Leontius, Pilatus,
Bessarion, and Lascaris. A glow of sober enthusiasm warms the great
scholar as he paints the early light of that happy dawn. He admits
that the "arms of the Turks pressed the flight of the Muses" from
Greece to Italy. But he "trembles at the thought that Greece might
have been overwhelmed with her schools and libraries, before Europe
had emerged from the deluge of barbarism, and that the seeds of
science might have been scattered on the winds, before the Italian
soil was prepared for their cultivation." In one of the most perfect
sentences to be found in English prose he thus describes the Greek
tongue: "In their lowest depths of servitude and depression, the
subjects of the Byzantine throne were still possessed of a golden key
that could unlock the treasures of antiquity, of a musical and
prolific language that gives a soul to the objects of sense and a body
to the abstractions of philosophy." Meanwhile we are made to feel that
the subjects of the Byzantine throne, with their musical speech, that
Constantinople with her libraries and schools, will all soon fall a
prey to the ravening and barbarous Turk. This brightening light of the
Western sky contending with the baleful gloom which is settling down
over the East, is one of the most happy contrasts in historical
literature. Then comes the end, the preparations and skill of the
savage invader, the futile but heroic defence, the overwhelming ruin
which struck down the Cross and erected the Crescent over the city of
Constantine the Great.

It is one of the many proofs of Gibbon's artistic instinct that he did
not end with this great catastrophe. On the contrary, he adds three
more chapters.