professing humility, would admit none but nobility into their
order; and died recommending themselves to sweet St. John, and
calmly hoping for heaven in consideration of all the heathen they
had slain. When this superb fraternity was obliged to yield to
courage as great as theirs, faith as sincere, and to robbers even
more dexterous and audacious than the noblest knight who ever sang
a canticle to the Virgin, these halls were filled by magnificent
Pashas and Agas, who lived here in the intervals of war, and having
conquered its best champions, despised Christendom and chivalry
pretty much as an Englishman despises a Frenchman. Now the famous
house is let to a shabby merchant, who has his little beggarly shop
in the bazaar; to a small officer, who ekes out his wretched
pension by swindling, and who gets his pay in bad coin.
Mahometanism pays in pewter now, in place of silver and gold. The
lords of the world have run to seed. The powerless old sword
frightens nobody now--the steel is turned to pewter too, somehow,
and will no longer shear a Christian head off any shoulders. In
the Crusades my wicked sympathies have always been with the Turks.
They seem to me the better Christians of the two: more humane,
less brutally presumptuous about their own merits, and more
generous in esteeming their neighbours. As far as I can get at the
authentic story, Saladin is a pearl of refinement compared to the
brutal beef-eating Richard--about whom Sir Walter Scott has led all
the world astray.

When shall we have a real account of those times and heroes--no
good-humoured pageant, like those of the Scott romances--but a real
authentic story to instruct and frighten honest people of the
present day, and make them thankful that the grocer governs the
world now in place of the baron? Meanwhile a man of tender