savages of Transatlantic regions at the court of Ferdinand and Ysabel. After pushing his adventures with continuous success, he is brought to the same court in chains, as the century comes to an end. What an end for such an age, and for its noblest hero!

At this date the discovery of Newfoundland by the Cabots (A. D. 1498) opens the grand history of the English race in America. Vespucci robs Columbus of his just rights, by giving his secondrate name to the continent. Copernicus, born at Thorn, in A. D. 1473, was now pursuing his studies of the universe. Surely the ages of light were returning

"To warm the nations with redoubled ray."

20. PRINTING.

The Crusades had introduced the cotton paper of the Arabs into Europe, and its manufacture with the stronger fibre of linen was established in Germany in the preceding age. But now comes the art of printing, the discovery of which must be regarded as not half so great a wonder as the fact that God had held back the mind and hand of man from the most simple of all conclusions until now. Every impression of a seal, every footmark in the sand or clay of the soil, every stamp upon coins, ought to have suggested it, ages beforehand. God willed it to wait till now, when the grandest moral and civil revolutions were needed to introduce the last ages of the world. Strange to say, stereotyping came first; for such were the

Uor M

wooden tables of Koster in 1430, though it took the sluggish wit of mankind nearly four centuries more to return to the hint. Gutenberg (A. D. 1442) had taught the utility of moveable types, and Faust had brought the art to a practical degree of perfection (A. D. 1450) by an improvement of the press and the manufacture of printers' ink. In A. D. 1455, the glory of the art was reached, when the final sheets of the first printed Bible were folded and bound at Mentz, by Gutenberg, Faust, and Schäffer. Caxton, in a chapel of Westminster Abbey, about ten years later, was working the first press in England. He died before he knew that a new world had just been discovered, where in our day the art in all its beauty and perfection is exercised in Chicago and in the great port of the Pacific, cities which fifty years ago were but hamlets, amid the wigwams of savages. Yet it deserves to be noted that the art reached wellnigh the acme of its beauty in the age of its birth, when Aldus (A. D. 1494), set up his press at Venice, and introduced the delicate Italic letter, a refinement upon that of manuscript.

21. GREAT MOVEMENTS.

Now, also, was wood engraving introduced, and musical notes were cut in type-metal. Watches were made at Nuremberg and world-maps were sent forth from the same city. But while these arts of peace were in progress, the "Wars of the Roses" were doing a useful work of another sort in England, and the expedition of Charles VIII. into

Italy, with his invasion of Rome on the last day of the year 1494, marks a new era in the art of war.1 His invention of a comparatively light and moveable artillery, and the improvement of fire-arms for soldiery, with his passage of the Alps and audacious treatment of the pontiff, were a foreshadowing of the French campaigns in Italy four hundred

years later. Napoleon's "flying artillery" was

but another stage of progress; the idea of batteries not only possible on the field, but transferable from point to point, belongs to this age of modern warfare.

But the glory and the shame of the century remains to be told. Providentially the art of printing and all the progress of the age circle round its noontide; a crisis which proved a blessing to mankind, as it created the revival of learning and insured the reformation of religion, the exposure of the Decretalist and other Papal frauds, the study of Holy Scripture in the originals, the abasement of the Papacy, the advance of freedom and of constitutional law, and the illumination of the world. Again the Gospel came forth from the East. All these blessings were wrought out of an evil, in itself most disgraceful and menacing to Christendom: the fall of Constantinople in A. D. 1453, and the planting of that cancer in the breast of civilization, the unspeakably abominable Turkey in Europe.

22. THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE.

The Council of Florence, in A. D. 1439, grew out of the impending horrors which the Greeks foresaw must soon overwhelm them. For ten years had they repelled the arms of Bajazet, when God sent Timour the Tartar to their aid; but now the Turks were at their very doors. Scutari was in the hands of the Ottomans, and, reinforced by siege-guns with balls of granite, were preparing for a final assault. Every motive appealed to the Christian universe for a crusade, which reason and righteousness would have justified. The cause of the Greeks was the common cause of Europe and of humanity; but the Popes saw their opportunity, at last, and would give no aid to the Easterns save at the price of their submission. Their delegates at Florence were starved and menaced into a patched-up compliance,1 and the "Uniat" compromises were agreed on. But they were received on their return with a howl of execration, and the Greeks, true to the ancient Nicene constitutions, once more rejected the Popes. The Turks might massacre them, but the fraudulent Decretals should not enslave them. As the consequence, on the 29th of May, Constantine Palæologus, the last of the Cæsars, perished on the walls of New Rome, which for more than a thousand years had been the metropolis of Christendom. Under the dome of Justinian, in the solemn night before, he had received the holy sacrament of the altar. That day the streets ran with blood, and, after the brutal 1 See Note R".

example of Mohammed II., their chief women were given over to unmentionable outrage; twelve thousand houses and churches were burned; thousands were put to the sword. Gibbon, with levity, tells of the horrors to which virgins were delivered, of sixty thousand sold into slavery, and of the Hippodrome streaming with blood. He shares not our sense of shame, when he tells how the imam ascended the pulpit, and the muezzin cried from its turrets, "Great is Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet!" To the disgrace of our mother England, this goes on still; and twelve million Christians writhe under the heels of three million Turks, because Turkish bonds are held in London. O Lord, how long? If England will not hear their cries, then Godspeed to Russia!

23. LIGHT OUT OF DARKNESS.

The Greeks were driven out of their capital, but they brought learning to Florence and to Rome. Now were the Greek Scriptures read once more, and the Fathers began to be printed and studied. Luther's great gift of the Bible to Germany must rank as second to the restoration of the Greek Testament by Erasmus. Aristotle's alloy in Christian theology began to be deprecated, as Plato began to be loved. The Greeks who had fled to Italy before the downfall had enabled Nicholas V. to found the Vatican Library, and now libraries began to be multiplied. It was well; for, as the century came to its end, the Papacy had returned to its vomit and to its wallowing in the mire. The age of Theodosia and