that the Mussulman could have
brought against the new nation. There would have been a regular flow of
Normans and other hardy adventurers to Byzantium, and the Turks never
would have been allowed to cross the Hellespont to establish themselves
in Europe, and would have been fortunate had they been able to keep the
Normans from crossing the Hellespont to establish themselves in Asia.
Thousands of those fanatics who were so soon to cover the Syrian sands
with their bones, as Crusaders, would have been attracted to Greece,
and would have done Christendom better service there than ever they were
allowed to render it under the Godfreys and Baldwins and Raymonds, the
Louises and Richards and Fredericks, who piously fought for the
redemption of the Redeemer's sepulchre. Indeed the Holy Sepulchre could
best have been freed from infidel pollution by operations from Greece,
had Greece renewed her life under a dynasty worthy of the Greeks of old;
and Asia, the Land of Light, might have been relieved from the thick
darkness under which it has so long labored, had Norman genius and
Norman valor been authoritatively employed to direct the Christian
populations of the East, reinforced by the surplus adventurers of the
West, against the Mussulmans. The West might have liquidated its debt to
the East, by restoring Christianity to it.

All this was on the cards, had Robert Guiscard lived a few years
longer,--and he was one of many sons of a poor and petty Norman baron,
and superior to thousands of his countrymen only in the circumstance
that he was more favored by Fortune. We are not to judge of what might
have been effected by a Norman dynasty in Greece by the miserable
failure of that Latin empire of which Greece was the scene in the
thirteenth century, and which grew out of the capture of Constantinople
by the French and the Venetians. That empire had not the elements of
success in it; and it was established too late, and on foundations too
feeble, to meet the demands of the time. Its founders lacked that
legislative capacity with which the Normans were so liberally endowed.
Though we cannot subscribe in full to Mr. Acton Warburton's enthusiastic
estimate of the Norman race, we believe him to be substantially correct
in what he says of their legislative genius. He dwells with unction on
the strong tendency to institutions that ever characterized them. This
tendency, he observes, strongly indicates "the profound sentiment of
perpetuity