only were no masses offered for him, as he had desired, but the present occupants of "All Souls," stigmatized the holy sacrifice of the mass, as a "damnable and idolatrous" ceremony.

In the course of his recent wanderings, he had marked the nice attention to personal comfort, and elaborate purveyance of all the luxuries of life, which prevailed in a scholastic establishment, designed by him rather to sever man's affections from the world, than to rivet them to its most sensual allurements. The well-stored buttery and steaming kitchen, now absorbed far more consideration than any thought of higher things. Had he anticipated the possibility of such a result, "All Bodies" would have been a more distinctive appellation than "All Souls," for a college of which the sons troubled themselves so much for the good things of this world, and so little for those of the other. They had a strange method of testifying the reverence they affected to feel for their founder's memory. They had, to be sure, repaired his old tomb in Canterbury cathedral, and a fine painted gewgaw they had made of it! but, beyond that trifling piece of attention, paid to his mouldering bones, he had nothing to thank them for. When bestowing ample possessions upon the endowment of "All Souls," he had not thought it unreasonable to stipulate, that, to the fellowships of the college, those should thereafter be first entitled, who could establish the nearest claim to kindred with himself. Such persons were, however, at the present day, avowedly excluded from the benefit which he had especially reserved for them, for no other reason than that they adhered to the religion which he had so well loved himself, and in which it had been his happiness to live and die! Would that worshipful assemblage of illustrious phantoms have deemed it possible that so monstrous a perversion of a founder's designs could have been tolerated, in a seat of the so-called liberal arts and sciences !

The archbishop concluded his remarks by observing that in the course of his morning's aerial ramble about Oxford, his attention had been attracted by a monument in progress, resembling in shape one of the market crosses of the old days of faith, which he had discovered was intended to honour the memories of certain doughty dignitaries of the newly established law Church. It puzzled him, he said, mightily, to reconcile the posthumous veneration with which it appeared those "Oxford fathers were now held in the university, with the fact that in that favoured region of the world of spirits to

which he had been happy enough to find admittance, he had never encountered any worthies of the name of Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer.

A dim grey streak of light now peered into the choir of St. Mary's, bearing so suspicious a resemblance to daybreak, that the congregated ghosts simultaneously vanished into thin air. The atmosphere of the old church remained, however, many hours charged with vapours of obsolete orthodoxy, under the influence of which a regius divine was that very morning,-it happened to be Sunday,-delivered of a sermon of such Popish tendencies, that his mouth was closed by authority for two years.

HISTORY OF THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA,

FROM THE FOUNDATION OF THE HOSPITAL OF ST. JOHN OF JERUSALEM, IN 1058, TILL THE CAPTURE of rhodes, in 1315.

THE death of Saphadin had left his kingdom to be divided amongst his sons. Meledin, or Melei, was the eldest, and Egypt fell to his share of the empire, as the soldancy of Damascus and Jerusalem was assigned to the younger, Coradin. The danger which menaced Damietta made Meledin anxious for peace, and he easily persuaded his brother, Coradin, to join him in suing for the necessary repose, for they both knew that were Damietta free from the Latins, the recovery of Syria could not be far distant. The restitution of the Wood of the Holy Cross, and of those places which either himself or his father, Saphadin, or his uncle, Saladin, had taken, as well as all the prisoners in Syria and Egypt, was offered to the Latins as the price of peace. The French, the English, and the Italians, would gladly have accepted the conditions; but the King, and the Duke of Austria, the Grand Masters of St. John, the Templars, and the Teutonic orders, with the Pope's legate, Pelagio, repelled the offer, declaring that the sole object of the present expedition was against the abominations of the Mohammedan superstition. The rejection of the offer induced Corradin, as a measure of policy, to destroy Jerusalem; lest it should at any time fall into the hands of the Christians, and become a place of defence against himself. Its walls

were overthrown, and the magnificent edifices and precious monuments, which adorned the beautiful city, were relentlessly destroyed. The tower of David only was spared, and the sepulchre of our Lord, the intreaties of the Christians of Armenia, Georgia, Ethiopia, and other parts of Asia, who still inhabited Jerusalem, had perhaps prevailed-perhaps a feeling of respect, which the Mohammedan religion inculcates to the tombs of the prophets. Happily for our holy religion, the levelling sect of the Mohabees was not in the days of Coradin.

The siege had now been prolonged for nearly nineteen months, in course of which numerous skirmishes had taken place, and feats of valour, with varying success, were frequent beneath the walls. But the periods of peace were many; and many, tired of the inactive, though constant, service, returned to Europe. The Cardinal Pelagio, moreover, the papal legate, had begun to assume an unwarranted control in the Latin camp, and distracted the councils of the chiefs, who were unwilling to submit to one wrapt in an alb, when there were enough cased in steel, better able to direct their movements. Was it zeal, or ambition, that induced Pelagio to assume so dictatorial a tone? It is certain he had ideas of vast

extent; for, by the conquest of Egypt, he meditated to gain quiet possession of Palestine, when he might afterwards direct the whole of the chivalry of Christendom against the infidels of the west, and, by an inundation of the soldiers of the Cross, make the extirpation of the Arabs from the rich plains of Spain, an easy and meritorious task. But his zeal was more than his talents; and the future disasters of the Latins, are, without doubt, to be attributed to his rashness and incompetency. Fresh soldiers having arrived from Italy, and Louis of Bavaria, with some of the princes and barons from Germany, having joined the camp, and replaced the ranks of those who had grown weary of the siege, a day was fixed for a grand assault, early in November 1219. All rushed with impetuosity to the walls, but the Greek fire repulsed them, and we are told that John of Brianne himself was sorely scorched and disfigured by a fiery missile. The third day after, as some soldiers wandered near the walls, an unwonted silence seemed to reign over the city, and they wondered, as they approached, that they saw no sentinels at their posts. Ladders were procured from the camp, and set against the walls, but no resistance was offered; the gates were opened, and the Christian army marched in without resistance into the deserted city.

It was the plague had passed over the devoted place; but some allowance must be made for what the historian tells us, that of seventy thousand inhabitants, scarcely three thousand remained, to purchase their lives from the triumphant Latins, by the removal of the bodies of their countrymen, that lay in heaps putrifying in the

streets.*

The city which had cost them so long a siege, the Latins were obliged immediately to evacuate; and they had to pass three months in their tents, before the air was sufficiently purified from the pestilential vapours, to enable them to return in safety. A solemn function was then performed, to give thanks to GOD for their success, and the mosque was purified from the abominations of Mohammed, and dedicated to the worship of the true GOD, under the invocation of the blessed Virgin Mary. With Damietta, Tanis, a strong fort on the road to Cairo, fell, and abundance of stores and provisions came unexpectedly into their hands. The warlike Pelagio resolved, at all hazards, to push on, and take Cairo itself. In vain did the leaders of the Christian army oppose the expedition; threats of excommunication followed any attempt at dissuasion, and the hosts, with reinforcements from Europe, set out on the ill-starred campaign. Victory seemed to smile on their first attempts, and it was not long before the country as far as Cairo was overrun by the Christian hosts. But the ease with which they occupied the country, was the effect of the policy of the Soldan of Egypt; he feigned fear, that he might make them more confident, and so become the more entangled in the snare he was preparing for them. So confident was Pelagio of success, that humiliating terms were sent to the Soldan, and by him, in his policy, not absolutely rejected, so that a month was lost in the fruitless and delusive negociation. The supplies of the Christians began to fail, the waters of the Nile were on the rise, and the artificial dykes of the Egyptians being broken by them, the flood poured in on the Christian camp, swept away their baggage, and left them, without provisions, surrounded by the waters. In vain did they look for assistance from the garrison of Damietta; they could send them none. Famine told fearfully in the camp; but still they would suffer rather than sue for mercy

* The general historian of the order, Pantaleon, has the following: "Viæ enim, vici, domusque cadaveribus erant refertæ; hic labor etiam eos in tres menses exercuit."—p. 70.

from the hands of the infidel. To his eternal honour be it told, that he pitied while he might have completely destroyed; he was the first to offer peace, though at the price of the evacuation of Egypt. But the Latins, even in their deep distress, wished to make other stipulations, they wished to treat as with an equal foe. And here we see one instance, among thousands, that occur in every page of the annals of these ages of faith—of the love they shewed for every thing connected with the mysteries of their redemption; for, before they sought for the return of the army in safety, and promised the restoration of Tanis into the hands of the Egyptian sovereign, they stipulated for the recovery of the wood of the true Cross. But the Soldan knew that they were in too humbled a state to treat on such equal terms as their demands implied: the modified conditions of the Christians were rejected, and the restitution of Damietta with its adjacent territory, and the evacuation were imperatively demanded. Necessity obliged them to comply. For a while the garrison of Damietta held out against the Soldan; but, for fear of worse consequences, they were persuaded to submit. A piece of money was taken from each soldier by the proud infidel, that it might not be said that they had occupied any part of his dominions, but as travellers; and, in the month of September 1221, princes and people, with much grief and lamentation, returned disconsolate to Palestine. The knights of Jerusalem and of the Temple, alone gave words of comfort to their Christian brethren, by high-sounding promises of better days, and days of coming restitution, when the Nile should float down the bodies and the possessions of the infidel, as it had already borne to the sea those of their friends and brethren.

Instead of mourning for the sins of the soldiers of the faith with St. Bernard, and attributing to that the failure of the present expedition which had begun so prosperously, and had so completely failed, -evil hearts and evil tongues sought excuse for the ill success anywhere but where they might find it due. The military orders did not miss their share of blame, though it fell more severely on the orders of the Hospital and the Temple, as dishonourable motives were imputed to them. The Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Hospitallers, and the Templars, had been appointed, by the fourth council of Lateran, the administrators of the papal bounty,-and that bounty the two orders were accused of appropriating to their private wants, to the neglect of the great object for which it was intended,