triumphant argument. Finally, indeed, they fell, king and people, shepherd and flock; but by that time their mission was fulfilled. And doubtless, as the noble Palaeologus lay on heaps of carnage, with his noble people, as life was ebbing away, a voice from heaven sounded in his ears the great words of the Hebrew prophet, 'Behold! YOUR WORK IS DONE; your warfare is accomplished.' III. Such, then, being the unmerited disparagement of the Byzantine government, and so great the ingratitude of later Christendom to that sheltering power under which themselves enjoyed the leisure of a thousand years for knitting and expanding into strong nations; on the other hand, what is to be thought of the Saracen revolutionists? Everywhere it has passed for a lawful postulate, that the Saracen conquests prevailed, half by the feebleness of the Roman government at Constantinople, and half by the preternatural energy infused into the Arabs by their false prophet and legislator. In either of its faces, this theory is falsified by a steady review of facts. With regard to the Saracens, Mr. Finlay thinks as we do, and argues that they prevailed through the _local_, or sometimes the _casual_, weakness of their immediate enemies, and rarely through any strength of their own. We must remember one fatal weakness of the Imperial administration in those days, not due to men or to principles, but entirely to nature and the slow growth of scientific improvements--viz.: the difficulties of locomotion. As respected Syria, Egypt, Cyrenaica, and so on to the most western provinces of Africa, the Saracens had advantages for moving rapidly which the Caesar had not. But is not a water movement speedier than a land movement, which for an army never has much exceeded fourteen miles a-day? Certainly it is; but in this case there were two desperate defects in the imperial control over that water service. To use a fleet, you must have a fleet; but their whole naval interest had been starved by the intolerable costs of the Persian war. Immense had been the expenses of Heraclius, and annually decaying had been his Asiatic revenues. Secondly, the original position of the Arabs had been better than that of the emperor, in every stage of the warfare which so suddenly arose. In Arabia they stood nearest to Syria, in Syria nearest to Egypt, in Egypt nearest to Cyrenaica. What reason had there been for expecting a martial legislator at that moment in Arabia, who should fuse and sternly combine her distracted tribes? What blame, therefore, to Heraclius, that Syria--the first object of assault, being also by much the weakest part of the empire, and immediately after the close of a desolating war--should in four campaigns be found indefensible? We must remember the unexampled abruptness of the Arabian revolution. The year sixteen hundred and twenty-two, by its very name of Hegira, does not record a triumph but a humiliation. In that year, therefore, and at the very