assault after assault upon the citadel which guarded its fate and the destiny of Europe, that the struggle waged between civilisation and barbarism during the history of New Rome is fully recognised to have been, indeed, a struggle for life, and that we learn to appreciate what we owe to the Warden of the Gates to the Western World. To these walls may be applied the words in which Mr. Gladstone appraised the value of the services rendered by the Christian populations of the Balkan Peninsula, in a similar connection. “They are like a shelving beach that restrained the ocean. That beach, it is true, is beaten by the waves; it is laid desolate; it produces nothing; it becomes perhaps nothing save a mass of shingle, of rock, of almost useless sea-weed. But it is a fence behind which the cultivated earth can spread and escape the incoming tide.... It was that resistance which left Europe to claim the enjoyment of her own religion, and to develop her institutions and her laws.” Although inferior as military works to the other portions of the landward walls, great historical interest is associated with the fortifications between the Wall of Manuel and the Golden Horn, for they guarded the Palace of Blachernæ, the favourite residence of the Byzantine Court from the time of Alexius Comnenus (1081-1118) until the fall of the Empire. As already intimated, the palace stood on the terrace buttressed by the Tower of Isaac Angelus and the chambered wall to the north of the tower, where the Mosque of Aivas Effendi is now found. The terrace was almost level with the parapet-walk of the fortifications, commanding fine views of the Golden Horn, and of the hills at the head of the harbour; and there the most splendid Court of the Middle Ages long displayed its wealth and pomp. What with the Crusades, and what with the relations, hostile and friendly, between the Italian Republics and the Government of Constantinople during the period of the Palæologi, it was in that palace that Western and Eastern Europe came into closest contact for good or for evil. On the hills and in the valleys seen from the western windows of the palace, the armies of the First Crusade encamped. To that residence came Peter the Hermit, Godfrey of Bouillon, Robert of Normandy, Bohemond, Tancred, “the mirror of knighthood,” Count Robert of Paris, to wonder at the marvels of Byzantine Art, and to attempt the co-operation of the East and the West, in the great political and religious undertaking of the times. On the hill immediately in front of the walls the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade pitched their tents, and thence Baldwin of Flanders and Hainaut, Henry his brother, Louis of Blois and Chartres, and Hugo of Saint Paul, led four divisions of the army against the wall erected by Leo the Armenian. The wall was held by Varangian troops, the imperial body-guard, recruited from England, Denmark, Norway, and Russia. “The assailants,” to quote the words of Ville-Hardouin, a witness of the