Villehardouin is undoubtedly the best authority for all the particulars of the siege of Constantinople. Nicetas was extravagantly prejudiced; and though the emperor Baldwin, in his letters to the Pope, was as frank as any man in his situation could be, it was but natural that he should endeavour to show the causes of the warfare in the most favourable point of view--that he should represent the conduct of himself and his companions with every advantage--in fact that he should see the events which raised him to the throne through a peculiar medium, and represent them tinged with the same colours that they presented to his own eyes. Villehardouin wrote without many of these disadvantages. He did not belong to the pillaged and conquered class, like Nicetas, nor did he write to excuse himself in the eyes of the Pope. He had his prejudices, of course, like other men, but these prejudices were greatly prevented from affecting his history by the frank simplicity of chivalrous manners, which no one possessed in greater purity than he did himself. In two points Philippe Mouskes gives a different account of the affairs of Constantinople from Villehardouin. In the first place, he states that Alexius Angelus, the brother of Isaac, commanded his nephew to be drowned; but that by entreaties the prince moved those persons who were charged with the cruel order. In the next place, he says that Murzuphlis caused Alexius the younger to be poisoned. In regard to the destruction of the monuments of art committed by the Latins, Nicetas gives a melancholy, though somewhat bombastic account. The famous works destroyed were as follows, according to his statement: A colossal Juno, from the forum of Constantine, the head of which was so large that four horses could scarcely draw it from the spot where it stood to the palace. The statue of Paris, presenting the apple to Venus. An immense bronze pyramid, crowned by a female figure, which turned with the wind. The colossal statue of Bellerophon, in bronze, which was broken down, and cast into the furnace. Under the inner nail of the horse's hind foot, on the left side, was found a seal, wrapped in a woollen cloth. A figure of Hercules, by Lysimachus, of such vast dimensions that the circumference of the thumb was equal in measurement to the waist of an ordinary man. From the attitude of this statue, as described by Nicetas, it is not improbable that it served as a model for that piece of sculpture, the only part of which that remains is the famous _Torso_. The Ass and his Driver, cast by order of Augustus, after the battle of Actium, in commemoration of his having discovered the position of Antony through the means of a peasant and his beast, the one bearing the name of _Fortunate_, and the other that of _Conqueror_.