down the principle of religious toleration with a
clearness which modern philsophers have considered to rival the theory
of Locke; and Timour, also established an efficient police in his
dominions, and was a patron of literature. Their sun went down full and
cloudless, with the merit of having shed some rays of blessing upon the
earth, scorching and withering as had been its day. It is remarkable
also that all three had something of a misgiving, or softening of mind,
miserably unsatisfactory as it was, shortly before their deaths.
Attila's quailing before the eye of the Vicar of Christ, and turning
away from Italy, I have already spoken of. As to Zingis, as, laden at
once with years and with the spoils of Asia, he reluctantly measured his
way home at the impatient bidding of his veterans, who were tired of
war, he seemed visited by a sense of the vanity of all things and a
terror for the evil he had done. He showed some sort of pity for the
vanquished, and declared his intention of rebuilding the cities he had
destroyed. Alas! it is ever easier to pull down than to build up. His
wars continued; he was successful by his lieutenants when he could not
go to battle himself; he left his power to his children and
grandchildren, and he died.

9.

Such was the end of Zingis, a pagan, who had some notion of Christianity
in a corrupted form, and who once almost gave hopes of becoming a
Christian, but who really had adopted a sort of indifference towards
religious creeds altogether. Timour was a zealous Mahometan, and had
been instructed in more definite notions of moral duty. He too felt some
misgivings about his past course towards the end of his life; and the
groans and shrieks of the dying and the captured in the sack of Aleppo
awoke for a while the stern monitor within him. He protested to the
cadhi his innocence of the blood which he had shed. "You see me here,"
he said, "a poor, lame, decrepit mortal; yet by my arm it has pleased
the Almighty to subdue the kingdoms of Iran, Touran, and Hindostan. I am
not a man of blood; I call God to witness, that never, in all my wars,
have I been the aggressor, but that my enemies have ever been the
authors of the calamities which have come upon them."[14]

This was the feeling of a mind sated with conquest, sated with glory,
aware at length that he must go further and look deeper, if he was to
find that on which the soul could really feed and live, and startled to
find the entranc