Looked at from a distance, the Crusades very generally wear the aspect of a stream of vivid colour--a spectacular progress of Europe through a corner of Asia, whose main feature is its brilliant picturesqueness. On the spot the quality in them which is by far the most impressive is their stern reality and fighting weight. The Crusader was doubtless one who in his time played many parts, but whatever else he was, no one who has seen the remains of his work will question that he was at least “a first-class fighting man.” The figure of Richard, as it is preserved for us in the records of the older historians, may be more or less apocryphal, but it is at least true enough to crusading ideals, which must have found many an actual realisation in these strong and fearless soldiers of the Cross. We read of amazing captures of booty; of single combats in which “the King at one blow severs the head, right shoulder and arm of his opponent from the rest of his body”; of a conflict in which only one Christian perished, while “the Turks lost seven hundred men and above fifteen hundred horses.” At Joppa the king leaps out of his ship before it can reach land, and rushes on the enemy. Three days later he and his knights are surprised and have to fight half-naked, some in their shirts and some even barefoot; yet they win. At another time we see Richard plunging alone into the midst of the hostile army, and fighting until Saladin’s brother sends him a gift of two Arab war-horses to enable him to fight it out. Altogether such a hero was he, that the Moslems asserted “that even the horses bristled their manes at the name of Richard.” No wonder if in the popular imagination he became for England hardly distinguishable from that St. George who had already been identified with Perseus, who on these same sands had fought the dragon for Andromeda. The grandeur of crusading warfare lingers in the mighty ruins of their castles. Nothing could surpass the impressiveness of these castles, seen on hill-tops from below, combing the sky with the sharp broken teeth of their ruined towers, or rearing a black “mailed head of menace” against the stars. Many of them are on the sites of older fortresses, and actually stand on Jewish or Roman foundations. By far the most imposing of such castles is that of Banias, which crowns that spur of Hermon at which “Dan leaped from Bashan” long ago. It must have been capable of quartering a small army, and the quantity of broken vessels confirms the impression. Cisterns, vaulted and groined archways, mosaic floors, dungeons, and every other luxury of their European homes had been imported hither.