g
any popular or national resistance to an active or enterprising enemy."
In this Mr Finlay does but agree with other able writers; but he and
they should have recollected, that hardly had that very year 623
departed, even yet the knell of its last hour was sounding upon the
winds, when this effeminate empire had occasion to show that she could
clothe herself with consuming terrors, as a belligerent both defensive
and aggressive. In the absence of her great emperor, and of the main
imperial forces, the golden capital herself, by her own resources,
routed and persecuted into wrecks a Persian army that had come down upon
her by stealth and a fraudulent circuit. Even at that same period, she
advanced into Persia more than a thousand miles from her own metropolis
in Europe, under the blazing ensigns of the cross, kicked the crown of
Persia to and fro like a tennis-ball, upset the throne of Artaxerxes,
countersigned haughtily the elevation of a new _Basileus_ more friendly
to herself, and then recrossed the Tigris homewards, after having torn
forcibly out of the heart and palpitating entrails of Persia, whatever
trophies that idolatrous empire had formerly wrested from herself. These
were not the acts of an effeminate kingdom. In the language of
Wordsworth we may say--

"All power was giv'n her in the dreadful trance;
Infidel kings she wither'd like a flame."

Indeed, no image that we remember can do justice to the first of these
acts, except that Spanish legend of the Cid, which assures us that, long
after the death of the mighty cavalier, when the children of those Moors
who had fled from his face whilst living, were insulting the marble
statue above his grave, suddenly the statue raised its right arm,
stretched out its marble lance, and drifted the heathen dogs like snow.
The mere sanctity of the Christian champion's sepulchre was its own
protection; and so we must suppose, that, when the Persian hosts came by
surprise upon Constantinople--her natural protector being absent by
three months' march--simply the golden statues of the mighty Caesars,
half rising on their thrones, must have caused that sudden panic which
dissipated the danger. Hardly fifty years later, Mr Finlay well knows
that Constantinople again stood an assault--not from a Persian hourrah,
or tempestuous surprise, but from a vast expedition, armaments by land
and sea, fitted out elaborately in the early noontide of Mahometan
vigour--and that assau