the boundaries of Palestine, were able, indeed, to discharge a great work of charity, but one whose limits were necessarily prescribed; the very defeat, however, which drove them out of Syria, and seemed even to threaten their extinction, became the means of opening to them a new sphere of action, in which they may be said to have become the protectors of all Christendom. The numbers they rescued from captivity, or saved from falling into a bondage often worse than death, are beyond calculation; and if the crusades, though failing in their primary object, yet kept the Moslems at bay during two centuries, and thus saved Europe from that inundation of infidelity which overwhelmed the eastern nations, the maritime power of the Knights of St. John contributed in no small degree to the same end, when the old crusading enthusiasm had faded and died away. As may be imagined, it was not with indifference that Melec Seraf, the conqueror of Acre, watched the resurrection to new life of an order he had thought to destroy. Its new enterprises and repeated successes against the commanders of his galleys stung him most sensibly; and he prepared a powerful flotilla to be despatched against Limisso, for the purpose of exterminating the insolent Hospitallers and razing their citadel to the ground. God, however, watched over His own cause. A civil war broke out in the sultan’s own dominions; he himself fell in the first engagement; and his successor had too much on his hands to be in a condition to pursue a distant expedition: thus the knights were saved from an attack against which they possessed scarcely any defences, and their naval power, instead of being crushed in its infancy, had time to strengthen and increase.