CHAPTER XII.
FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE, A.D. 1453.
HETHER Constantine was to be really the last of the Roman emperors, or whether the poor shrunken remains of what had been the grandest of empires were still fated to prolong their feeble and precarious existence, hung, it would seem, on two contingencies. If the Turk could not be permanently withstood, he might perhaps be stayed for a time, in the event of the sword of Othman passing into the hands of a weak or unambitious sovereign. To a barbarian power in its early advance, the character and capacity of a ruler are all important. The great and valiant Amurath, who had shaken with his artillery the walls of the city of the Cæsars, and had struck down on the field of Varna a Christian host led by the heroic John Huniades, died in 1451, and, as has often happened, might leave his sceptre to a weak and contemptible successor. There was another possibility. The Christian league which Pope Eugenius had formed, and which Amurath had baffled, might be revived, and who could say that this time it might not be successful? There would seem to
