re
town on the Cilician border of Asia Minor. This is that Sultan Soliman,
who plays so conspicuous a part in Tasso's celebrated Poem of "Jerusalem
Delivered,"--

That Solyman, than whom there was not any
Of all God's foes more rebel an offender;
Nay, nor a giant such, among the many
Whom earth once bore, and might again engender;
The Turkish Prince, who first the Greeks expelling,
Fixed at Nicaea his imperial dwelling.

And then he made his infidel advances
From Phrygian Sangar to Meander's river;
Lydia and Mysia, humbled in war's chances,
Bithynia, Pontus, hymned the Arch-deceiver;
But when to Asia passed the Christian lances,
To battle with the Turk and misbeliever,
He, in two fields, encountered two disasters,
And so he fled, and the vexed land changed masters.

Two centuries of military effort followed, and then the contest seemed
over; the barbarians of the North destroyed, and Europe free. It seemed
as though the Turks had come to their end and were dying out, as the
Saracens had died out before them, when suddenly, when the breath of the
last Seljukian Sultan was flitting at Iconium, and the Crusaders had
broken their last lance for the Holy Sepulchre, on the 27th of July,
1301, the rule and dynasty of the Ottomans rose up from his death-bed.

2.

Othman, the founder of the line and people, who take from him the name
of Ottoman or Osmanli, was the grandson of a nomad Turk, or Turcoman,
who, descending from the North by Sogdiana and the Oxus, took the
prescriptive course (as I may call it) towards social and political
improvement. His son, Othman's father, came into the service of the last
Sultan of the Seljukian line, and governed for fifty-two years a horde
of 400 families. That line of sovereigns had been for a time in alliance
with the Greek Emperors; but Othman inherited the fanaticism of the
desert, and, when he succeeded to his father's power, he proclaimed a
gazi, or holy war, against the professors of Christianity. Suddenly,
like some beast of prey, he managed to leap the mountain heights which
separated the Greek Province from the Mahomedan conquests, and he
pitched himself in Broussa, in Bithynia, which remained from that time
the Turkish capital, till it was exchanged for Adrianople and
Constantinople. This was the beginning of a long series of
conquests lasting about 270 years, till the Ottomans became one of the
first, if not the first power, not onl