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eminently zealous and spirited pope to unite the Western States in anything like a Crusade against a power which as yet was not a direct menace to any one of them. There was a greater disposition to count the cost of an enterprise than there had been in the simpler and more credulous days of old. Nor was the papal throne filled by a man of any conspicuous vigour and enthusiasm. The Roman pontiff of the period, Nicholas V., in many respects worthily represented his high office; but he had neither ability nor inclination to make that supreme effort which alone could ward off the huge calamity impending over Christendom. He was not a man of action; he was a scholar, and a patron of scholars; and he spent the eight years of his pontificate in quietly collecting manuscripts of the classics, and in forming a library. He seems indeed to have felt that it was his duty to do something for the Greeks in their distress, and "he had it in his mind"—so it is courteously expressed by a writer of the time—"to help them." But his heart was clearly not in the matter. He did not in fact like the Greeks. Their duplicity towards the Latin Church, and their unwillingness to cast off their heresy and to unite themselves with Western Christendom on the prescribed conditions, had disgusted him. He had even gone so far as to prophesy their downfall and the conquest of their capital. We have to thank him that, as soon as he saw his prophecy accomplished, he did his best to rescue the relics of the Byzantine libraries; but it occurs to us to ask, with something of reproach, whether he might not have been the means of preserving for us the con-