to Vienna, then to Prague, where he died miserably, four months after the murder of Hunyadi's eldest son. A National Diet was assembled under the walls of Pesth, for the election of a new sovereign; and in the midst of the enthusiastic, delirious acclamations of the patriots, people, and no

bility, Mathias Corvinus, a boy fifteen years old, the second and worthy son of the saviour of Hungary, was proclaimed King on the 24th January, 1458. The hero Hunyadi thus received, in death, an eternal crown of gratitude, unparalleled in history.

THERE lies off the coast of Asia Minor, at the foot of the Ionian archipelago, facing the wide channel which parts Candia from the southernmost points of Greece, an island famous in song and story. Rhodes is its name, name of grace and beauty, which the impress on its antique coins, a sort of "armoirie parlante," associates with the rose, Pódos, queen flower of all. We believe, however, that the emblem suggested the etymology, not the true etymon the name. For the earliest Greek geographers called the island 'Opovoa, the snake island; and the Phoenician 'rout,' or serpent, was probably the sound modified into Rhodos by those Dorian colonists who, first of such as spoke a dialect of Hellas, conquered the island and settled there.

Be this as it may, poets, philosophers, historians, jurists, have combined to recount its glories and to sing its praise. From the epic scroll of Homer to the enamelled lines of Horace the name of Rhodes gleams upon many a poetic page.

Tradition ran that never had one whole day been spread with gloom so cloudy but what the rays of the Sun God, who smiled on Rhodes eternally, had burst through it to make the Rhodians glad.

Ενθα ποτὲ βρέχει Θεῶν βασιλέυς
Χρυσαῖς νιφάδεσσι πόλιν.

"That isle the king of gods," sang Pindar, "doth bathe in showers of golden dew."

In grateful token of Apollo's acknowledged favour, the bronze worldmarvel, the Colossus, wrought by the Lyndian Chares, bestrode the harbour to bless the outward and welcome the homeward bound ships of Rhodes.

It was but one of three thousand images of bronze or marble which, in the capital, challenged the admiration of every educated eye. To name one painter is to declare the eminence of the Rhodian school. Protogenes was a Rhodian citizen. The severer studies were cultivated there with so much zeal, and were so thoroughly popularized, as apparently to shame the efforts of our modern Mechanics' Institutes. It is a Rhodian tale which tells how, on its seashore, the wrecked philosopher, who knew not whither the storm had driven him, took comfort when he saw the geometrical figures which some wanderer by the seaside had left scrawled upon the sand. Rhodes was the earthly Elysium of architects and shipbuilders; nowhere did such high honour or such profitable pay reward them. But its jealous citizens punished with death intrusive inquiry into the secrets of their dockyards. In commerce they were, for centuries, without competitors; and down to the days of the Cæsar, who refused to hear appeal in a salvage case against the "lex rhodia," the law of the Mediterranean Sea was little else than the custom of Rhodes. The poor law of the island, too, had been among the famous points of the administration of its commonwealth.

And if the versatile genius of its inhabitants, together with its exquisite cultivation, would seem to give token rather of Ionian origin and kinsmanship with Athens, the sturdiness of their valour and their unflinching fight for independence or commercial safety showed them no mongrels, but true to the old bulldog Dorian breed.

It was their just boast that in vain

had Poliorcetes set up his famous ελεπόλις, the city-taking engine, against their walls. Not only equal valour met and foiled him, but engineering skill fully equal to his own. From before the same walls Mithridates had gone baffled away. It is true that at last the Rhodian commonwealth had been absorbed into the irresistible dominion of Rome; but it lost its independence with so much of courage and of dignity that it seemed, in so doing, to fall in with rather than to be conquered by the Roman system. In the latter days of its history, the sovereignty of Rhodes had been vested, not without frequent, and sometimes long, interruptions, in the Emperors of Constantinople. The Arabs had early swooped upon and plundered it. Moawiyah, Lieutenant of the fourth Khalif Othman, had sold, it is said, to Jews, the fragments of the bronze Colossus, which, as far back as the time of Strabo, an earthquake had levelled with the ground; and which, as he tells us, an oracle had forbidden the citizens to re-erect.

In the feeble hands of the Byzantine emperors the island was rarely safe from piratical ravages, and its creeks and harbours were not seldom fortified as strongholds by the pirates who ravaged it.

For a time, during the Middle Ages, it was held by the Genoese, to whom it fell upon the taking of Constantinople by the Latins. It remained, indeed, in their possession until John Ducas-whose surname of Vataces Major Porter's work, we trust by a mere misprint, has transformed into "Vatiens!"-again reduced it into Greek subjection.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century this sovereignty had again dwindled into a name, and a certain race of lords, or "Despotai," of lower Greek origin, Gualla by name, seems to have ruled in Rhodes over a mixed population of Greeks, Arabs, and Turkomans.

Historical recollections can scarcely have swayed the mind of Guillaume de Villarets, the twenty-third Master of the Hospital, in fixing upon that island as the most desirable future possession and residence of his Order. Neither could he have foreseen the future establishment, in Constantinople, of the yet unborn OttomanTurkish power. But the selection

proves him to have possessed the instinctive genius of great statesmen and commanders.

The chief maritime enemy against whom, for years, the Christians of Palestine had contended was, of course, the Soldan of Egypt; and in regard of his position and that of the naval armaments and commercial fleets of Alexandria, the selection of Rhodes was most judicious. At all events it is undoubted that the design of seizing upon the island was first conceived by De Villarets, deeply meditated, and carefully planned. His greatest sorrow, when prostrated by sickness upon what proved to be his death-bed, was his inability to accomplish a scheme which lay so near his heart. But there was one knight in the Order, Foulques de Villarets, whom some will have a brother, some only a cousin of his own, to whom, before dying, he made known his intimate plans, and whose capacity and bravery pointed him out as best fitted to insure their "execution." Aware of this, the Order forthwith elected him Grand Master, and from that moment the whole of his abilities and energy were devoted to the great undertaking.

Passing over into Europe he obtained at Poitiers interviews with the French King Philippe-le-bel, and with that Clement V. who was so largely indebted to him for his accession to the Pontifical chair. To them he confided the secret of his design, in support of which, without divulging its real object, a new crusade, the last in effect, was set on foot.

Plenary indulgence was proclaimed for all who should take arms under Foulques' banner, and he is said to have been encumbered by the overflowing numbers of those who answered this appeal. Galleys for their transport were collected at Brindisi, furnished in part by Charles II. of Sicily, in greater part by the Republic of Genoa. The noblest ladies of that city sold their jewels to furnish him with funds, and these, together with certain advances from the Pope, formed the bulk of the contents of his military chest.

From Brindisi, the armament, ignorant of its own precise destination, passing in purposed feint by Rhodes, steered for Cyprus, where it received reinforcement of knights and other troops in readiness at Limisso. Sail

ing thence it put in to the Gulf of Macri, the Glaucus Sinus of the ancients.

There, deep embowered amidst wooded hills, which rise behind it as if in continuation of its rows of seats, stood and stands the ruined theatre of the oracular city of Telmessus. It looks out upon a glorious bay, far on the right of which the rocky chain which runs between the provinces of Caria and Lycia projects its last barren articulations into the sea, like the spine of some huge fossil monster. Nearer, on the left, two lordly mountain peaks arise, Cragus and Anticragus, haunts of the fabled Chimæra. Their wooded bases are washed by the waves, on which dance islets, clothed to the water's edge with underwood of luscious green. On one of these the traveller still sees with interest the ruins of the fort, built by the Hospital Knights. Inland the rich plain is carpeted in summer with carpet of darkest green oleander, embroidered with the profuse pink of its rose-like blossoms. A rocky plateau comes down in a sheer cliff to one place near the ruins, and magnificent rock-tombs, with sculptured panels, are carved in the living stone. On the slopes stand the grand old sepulchral pot, huge sarcophagi of hewn stone upon lofty pedestals; and here and there, from this city of the dead, over the ruins of the once living city, dead likewise now, a solitary palm springs up and waves its boughs above the desolation.

From this fair spot they say that Foulques-willing, if it might be, to have right no less than might upon his side in the attempted undertaking, not yet disclosed to any but his own sworn brethren of the Order-despatched a messenger to Andronicus Palæologus, at Constantinople, requesting from him a formal investiture of sovereignty. The answer was a negative; and, by-and-by, when Foulques was already landed and in conflict at Rhodes, a body of Byzantine troops sent to reinforce its defenders against him. Authentic records of the protracted struggle which had to be sustained for the mastery of Rhodes are very few. It is known that many of the volunteers from Europe returned when the object of the campaign was clear. Master of the open country, it was long before

Foulques could prevail against the city. The siege became a blockade. New troops had to be raised; new money found to pay them, borrowed, with much difficulty, from the banking houses of Florence. Nevertheless the star of the Order of St. John was unquestionably still in the ascendant, and, on the 15th of August, 1310, the victorious knights and their allies carried the city of Rhodes by storm.

The submission of the strong castle of Lindo, then of the entire island, and within no long time of the islets clustering in the neighbourhood followed without intermission or serious check.

As the busy folk of our own Channel Islands are said, perhaps by too censorious tongues, to have found means, during the long wars which closed the eighteenth and opened the present century, to combine to their own great pecuniary profit the occupation of the legitimate trader with that of the dashing privateer, so was it with the Hospitallers and their subject population. Every knight in residence at Rhodes was bound to make, at least, one cruise in the course of the year. Such cruise, in the technical language of the Order, went by the name of Caravan; and, if the commerce of Christian or even Saracen allies found in the knightly galleys an active sea-police, the commerce of non-friendly Mahometans furnished a succession of rich prizes to be towed into the Rhodian ports.

But, sooth to say, this course of life and this source of revenue were soon found to be but little compatible with the severer features of the vows and former discipline of the Order. This is the time of the division into distinct languages-a division in more senses than one. For although, as an expedient to quell the jealousies and heart-burnings which arose concerning the distribution of honours and offices amongst the brethren from different nations, it was resolved to attach definitely and perpetually certain of these dignities to each separate langue or tongue, yet after-experience proved that the separate ties thus formed became too often the bands of intrigue and conspiracy. Pride, luxury, and an inordinate love of riches began to develop themselves among the knights, in apparent forgetfulness of the doom which their

evil reputation in this respect had brought upon the Templars. Of course it is not to be supposed that the reproach of these vices had hitherto been cast upon one brotherhood only. Martène, in his "Collectio amplissima," has edited a curious lampoon, in Latin verse, which dates from the thirteenth century, and must have been written, as one perceives at a glance, before the final evacuation of the Holy Land. The satirist represents himself as weary of the world's ways, and anxious to betake himself for penitence and asceticism to some one or other of the existing religious orders, and proceeds thus :

"Sed quia diverse species sunt religionis,
Nescio præcipuè quæ sit habenda mihi.
Si cruce signatis rubeâ me confero Templo,
Trans mare me mittent solvere vota Deo.
Servus ero servum facient procul esse seor-

Quod per me careat ordo rigore suo. Ingrediar miles ne candida pallia desint; Sed tunc ab bellum* nox rediturus ero. De cute corrigiam nostra soldanus habebit Et comedet carnes bestia sæva meas.

Aut circumcisi gladius mea viscera fundet,

Detracto corio cætera dabit humo. Rursum si uero crucis Hospitalarius ille, Ad Libanum mittar ligna referre domum. Cum lacrymis pergam scuticâ cædente trinodi,

Et venter vacuus et quasi vellus erit. Multa licet subeant mihi, nil de jure licebit Præter mentiri magnificando domum. Et si ingressus fecero semel atque secundo, Vade foras dicent, diripient que crucem." Which, for the benefit of lady read ers, we submit in Hudibrastic paraphrase:

"But since these Orders be a host

Whither should I betake me most?
Would I a red-cross Templar be?
Then must I sail beyond the sea,
Sent from my country far away,
My vows in distant lands to pay:
To live a drudge and rise no higher,
Perchance within the walls of Tyre.
Yet not afoot: I might bestride
A nag, of easy pace to ride,

Well stalled with oats, who plump and
sleek

Would pick his steps, well-broken, meek.

To mount high trotter breaks the rule,
Which yet enjoins it. Sure a fool
Were I to make that Order be
False to its strictest rule for me.
A soldier midst the white cloaks too
Needs must I march, if men were few:
But from a battle-field, alack!
Perchance I never might march back:
And my poor skin, well tanned and dried,
Might serve the Soldan as a hide,
Long after jackals, in the field,
Had gnawed my luckless carcase, peeled
By some fierce circumcised hound,"
Who left it weltering on the ground.
But if a Hospit'ller profest

I stitch the white cross on my breast:
To Lebanon all clad with snow
To bring home logs I needs must go.
Too late to weep my servile lot
In reach of thong with triple knot.
Nor might I find, though hungry still,
Wherewith my stinted paunch to fill.
Whatever thoughts my brain might crowd
"Twere best not utter them aloud:
Unless I chose, with bragging lies,
T'extol Our Convent to the skies.
And should they catch me once in fault,
Or twice (since human gait will halt),
They'd strip from me their cross I wore,
To send me packing, . . "There's the door!"

In England, in the next century, and at the time of the great rebellion of the Commons of Essex and Kent under Richard II., the special fury of the rioters was directed against the houses and possessions of the Knights of St. John. Their magnificent priory in Clerkenwell was sacked and fired, Though the Order generally, and its burning for seven days together. belongings, would seem to have been obnoxious to the rebels, it is probable that the personal demeanour of the then Grand Prior may have provoked this rancour. He was a certain Sir Robert Hales, and was, moreover, at the time Lord Treasurer of the Kingdom. When the rebels, gathered on the king; and when some thought it Blackheath, sought a conference with best that he should go to them and know what their meaning was, Sir Robert breathed nothing but wrath and punishment and together with Simon de Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, "spake earnestly against that advice, and would not by any means that the king should go to 'such a sort of barelegged ribalds,' but rather they wished that he should take some order to abate the pride of 'such vile rascals.”

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From the date of its foundation by

Gerald, to the fatal day of the bloody retreat from Acre, two centuries of exploit and adventure fill, as we have seen, the annals of the Order. Upon these we have dwelt at a length somewhat disproportionate, either to the space occupied by its whole records in general history, or to that which we can in this article devote to remembrance of them. But this we have done advisedly: in part, because we have thought that we should thus enable the reader to seize more firmly upon the true notion of the character and development of this great Institution in great part also, because this most interesting pristine period, is that in which a far more extended and accurate acquaintance with the history of the times than was possessed by Vertot or even Bosio, is required for him who shall, in modern times, become the successful historian of the Knights of St. John. No such wholesale destruction of their archives, records, statutes, and other historical documents, as occurred in the disaster of Acre, ever again befel them and, thenceforward, there does not lie upon their historian the same obligation to collect his materials from vast and widely scattered masses of information, wherein that which actually concerns the peculiar history of the Order lies in grains only, as smaller "nuggets" in great cradlesfull of quartz.

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For two more centuries after its establishment at Rhodes, did the Order of St. John run its next cycle of an existence even more distinct and individual than it had hitherto known; retaining the peculiarity of its celibate and quasi-conventual character, yet assuming attributes and exercising functions common to other ordinary independent and temporal sovereignties.

And it is but fair to say, that if the remembrance of its semi-ecclesiastical nature made men, not without reason, often contrast invidiously the secular aspect of the Order's actual practice with its religious profession, the undeniable services which it was yet destined to render Christendom, threatened by the consolidating and expanding power of the Ottoman dynasty, made it retain claims universally allowed upon the indulgence, and even admiration, of its contemporaries.

The internal history of the Order during this new cycle presents few features of interest to others than its professed students. As might have been expected, leadership and office having now become not simply the martyrlike pre-eminence in posts of danger, which they had been in Palestine, ambitious rivalries and dissensions not seldom arose concerning their disposal.

Even the division into languages was not found sufficient without the formation of an additional one. The original division was into seven :-France, Provence, Auvergne, Italy, Germany, England, and Aragon. To counterbalance the overwhelming influence of the French element in the Order, the latter tongue, towards 1461, was separated from that of Portugal, with Leon and Castille, detached and compacted into an eighth tongue.

Neither is it any way surprising that the Roman pontiffs, who had always exercised an acknowledged right of patronage, if not of suzerainty, over the Institution, should have endeavoured to profit by its dissensions, for the purpose of increasing their own power of interference with nominations and supreme elections, though such interferences were in detriment, for the more part, of rights and immunities conceded and confirmed by the see of Rome itself.

As to the actual dominions of the Order, they were not only extended and consolidated in the Archipelago, but advanced guards and posts of vantage secured the coasts of Asia Minor. The site, for instance, of the ancient Halicarnassus was seized on as a sort of compensation for the loss of Smyrna, and its massive ruins converted into a strong fortress. It would, perhaps, be difficult to decide whether the fragments of those masterly sculptures, wherewith Artemisia adorned the renowned memorial of her mausoleums, and which even now are being disposed in the portico of our national museum, are indebted rather for preservation than for mutilation to the military builders of the Hospital.

Smyrna had been confided to the guardianship of the Knights upon its capture from the Turks, in 1344, by a combined fleet of Papal, Venetian, Cypriot, and Parian galleys, in con