he jails, took a momentary fit of compunction,
were seized with pity for some of the victims, and after saving them
from their murderers, accompanied them home, and witnessed with tears of
joy the meeting between them and their relations. We are not warranted,
after such facts have been recorded on authentic evidence in all ages,
in asserting that this transient humanity is assumed or hypocritical.
The conclusion rather is, that the human mind is so strangely compounded
of good and bad principles, and contains so many veins of thought
apparently irreconcilable with each other, that scarce any thing can be
set down as absolutely impossible, but every alleged fact is to be
judged of mainly by the testimony by which it is supported, and its
coincidence with what has elsewhere been observed of that strange
compound of contradictions, the human heart.

In the events which have been mentioned, the Crusaders were victorious;
and the Crescent, in the outset of the contest, waned before the Cross.
But it was only for a time that it did so. The situation of Palestine in
Asia, constituting it the advanced post as it were of Christendom across
the sea, in the regions of Islamism, perpetually exposed it to the
attack of the Eastern powers. They were at home, and fought on their own
ground, and with their own weapons, in the long contest which followed
the first conquest of Palestine; whereas the forces of the Christians
required to be transported, at a frightful expense of life, over a
hazardous journey of fifteen hundred miles in length, or conveyed by sea
at a very heavy cost from Marseilles, Genoa, or Venice. Irresistible in
the first onset, the armament of the Christians gradually dwindled away
as the first fervour of the Holy Wars subsided, and the interminable
nature of the conflict in which they were engaged with the Oriental
powers became apparent. It was the same thing as Spain maintaining a
transatlantic contest with her South American, or England with her North
American colonies. Indeed, the surprising thing, when we consider the
exposed situation of the kingdom of Palestine, the smallness of its
resources, and the scanty and precarious support it received, after the
first burst of the Crusades was over, from the Western powers, is not
that it was at last destroyed, but that it existed so long as it did.
The prolongation of its life was mainly owing to the extraordinary
qualities of one man.

It is hard to say whether th