nt-like prince, amidst his weeping followers. England reappeared with
lustre in the last glare of the flames of the crusades, before they sunk
for ever; the blood of the Plantagenets proved worthy of itself. Prince
Edward again erected the banner of victory before the walls of Acre, and
his heroic consort, who sucked the poison of the assassin from his
wounds, has passed, like Belisarius or Coeur de Lion, into the
immortal shrine of romance. Awful was the catastrophe in which the
tragedy terminated; and the storm of Acre, and slaughter of thirty
thousand of the Faithful, while it finally expelled the Christians from
the Holy Land, awakened the European powers, when too late, to a sense
of the ruinous effect of those divisions which had permitted the
vanguard of Christendom, the bulwark of the faith, to languish and
perish, after an heroic resistance, on the shores of Asia.

Nor was it long before the disastrous consequences of these divisions
appeared, and it was made manifest, even to the most inconsiderate, what
dangers had been averted from the shores of Europe, by the contest which
had so long fixed the struggle on those of Asia. The dreadful arms of
the Mahometans, no longer restrained by the lances of the Crusaders,
appeared in menacing, and apparently irresistible strength, on the
shores of the Mediterranean. Empire after empire sank beneath their
strokes. Constantinople, and with it the empire of the East, yielded to
the arms of Mahomet II.; Rhodes, with its spacious ramparts and
well-defended bastions, to those of Solyman the Magnificent; Malta, the
key to the Mediterranean, was only saved by the almost superhuman valour
of its devoted knights; Hungary was overrun; Vienna besieged; and the
death of Solyman alone prevented him from realizing his threat, of
stabling his steed at the high altar of St Peter's. The glorious victory
of Lepanto, the raising of the siege of Vienna by John Sobieski, only
preserved, at distant intervals, Christendom from subjugation, and
possibly the faith of the gospel from extinction on the earth. A
consideration of these dangers may illustrate of what incalculable
service the Crusades were to the cause of true religion and
civilization, by fixing the contest for two centuries in Asia, when it
was most to be dreaded in Europe; and permitting the strength of
Christendom to grow, during that long period, till, when it was
seriously assailed in its own home, it was able to defend itself. I