for the harvests of Moab, Hebron, Bethlehem (the house of bread'), and Jericho did not suffice to feed the population. The Sea of Galilee was as full of fish as in the time of Our Lord, and boats plied upon its waters. But, owing to the general insecurity of the open country, few of the cultivators of the soil were Franks; and, where we find Latin peasants, they are usually not far from the shelter of fortified towns. Of manufactures the most important were those of silk at Tripolis, Tiberias, and Tyre, dyeing, and pottery; the glass of Tyre is specially praised by its archbishop, and the goldsmiths had a street all to themselves at Jerusalem.

Civilisation, so far as comfort was concerned, had reached a high level. Every castle had its baths; and minstrels and dancers appeared at the entertainments of the barons, while we read of theatrical performances at a coronation. A considerable amount of gambling went on in royal circles. Baldwin III was devoted to dice; the Prince of Antioch and the Count of Edessa were so busy with their dice-boxes during a campaign, that they demoralised many of their officers; the Count of Jaffa was so deeply engrossed in a game of dice which he was playing in the street of the Tanners at Jerusalem, that he allowed himself to be assassinated. Hunting with the falcon, and, in Arab fashion, with the cat-like animal known as the carable, were favourite amusements. It seems strange that nothing was done to encourage horse-breeding; and, as the Moslems were loth to sell horses to be used against themselves, the Franks usually imported their steeds from Apulia. Every spring it was the custom of the Frankish chivalry to take their horses to feed on the rich grass at the foot of Mt Carmel; and there, by the brook Kishon, where Elijah slew the prophets of Baal, tournaments were held, in which Saracen chiefs sometimes took part, and after which the combatants refreshed themselves with sherbet, made from the snows of Lebanon.

We must not expect a military colony, always fighting for its existence, to be very productive of literature. But perhaps the best specimen of medieval history, the great work of William of Tyre, was produced by a Frank born in the Holy Land. The author possessed the two greatest qualities for writing the history of his own

times-personal acquaintance with the principal actors in the drama by reason of his high official position, and at the same time fearless love of truth. He tells us that he was well aware of the perils to which he thus exposed himself; and, if it be true that he was poisoned in Rome by order of a rival whom he had denounced, his forebodings were only too accurate. Having been a diplomatist, a prelate, a royal tutor, and chancellor of the kingdom, he possessed an unrivalled experience of men and affairs; and, as is usual with such persons, he was much more moderate in his judgments of human frailty than purely literary or monastic chroniclers.

A minor literary luminary was Renaud, baron of Sagette, who amazed the pundits of Saladin by his Oriental scholarship; and the cult of French novels was diffused among the nobles of the Holy Land, whose legal knowledge was considerable. Philip of Navarre,* the celebrated pleader, who has left a treatise showing how to make the worse cause appear the better in the feudal courts, tells us that he owed his knowledge of legal practice to the accident of being appointed reader of romances to the Seneschal of Jerusalem, who in return taught him law. The pleader, who also composed a historical work and a treatise on the four ages of man, and was an opponent of the higher education of women, is described by Florio Bustron, the Cypriote historian, as a 'huomo universale.'

In estimating the architectural results of the Frankish rule, we must remember the short time available-so far as all but the coast towns were concerned. But a traveller, who visited the country in 1185, tells us that the Franks had done much for the mural decoration of their churches, of which, beginning with Tancred's church on Mt Tabor in 1111, they erected many before the catastrophe of Hattin. William of Tyre specially mentions the munificence of Queen Mélisende in founding a church and convent at Bethany, of which her youngest sister was Superior and her splendidly bound copy of the Gospels is in the British Museum. In the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and in the cathedral and castle of Tortosa, still linger traces of the Crusaders.

* Mas Latrie, 'Histoire de l'Île de Chypre,' i, 200, 256.

In conclusion, we may ask how Frankish society in Palestine compares with Frankish society in Cyprus and in the Latin principalities of the present Greek kingdom. Very different from either Frankish Palestine or Frankish Greece was the condition of the kingdom of Cyprus, created by a mere accident of the Crusades, which nominally continued the tradition of the kingdom of Jerusalem. While the reason of the latter's existence was war, Cyprus was essentially a commercial state, to which the loss of Acre was a blessing in disguise. So long as the kings of Cyprus, in their capacity of kings of Jerusalem, had territory on the opposite coast of Syria, they were necessarily involved in continental wars, and could not devote themselves to the development of their own island; as was the case of the kings of England, so long as they held the damnosa hereditas of the Plantagenets in France. Cyprus was, like England, defended by the sea; like England, she became one of the marts of the world, in an age when the crusading spirit had died away, and trade was the attraction that led men to the East. The popes, by prohibiting trade with the Saracens after the loss of the Holy Land, procured for Cyprus a monopoly; and Famagosta surpassed Constantinople, Venice, and Alexandria. Moreover, warned by the example of Jerusalem, the kings of Cyprus cut down the privileges of the nobles, who were denied the right of coinage and jurisdiction over the middle class. Consequently, the Cypriote monarchy was more independent, and continued to prosper until it allowed-and this should be to us a warning-foreign competitors, under the guise of commerce, to creep into its cities and ultimately to dictate its policy.

All the Latin states in the East, whether in Jerusalem, Cyprus, or Greece proper, presented examples of that difficult political experiment—the rule of a small alien minority over a large native majority of a different religion, an experiment worked most successfully in those states, like Lesbos under the Genoese Gattilusi, where the Latin rulers became assimilated with the ruled. But in Frankish Greece the feudal states were not commercial; and the Venetian and Genoese colonies were, except in Negroponte, quite distinct from them. The Frank conquerors of Greece did not go thither with Vol. 230.-No. 456.

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the noble aims which led some of the leaders of the First Crusade to the Holy Land; on the contrary, they turned aside from the recovery of the Holy City to partition a Christian Empire. Yet the moral standard of the Franks in Greece was much higher than that of their predecessors in Palestine, or their contemporaries in Cyprus. Possibly, the reason was that they lived healthier lives, and had fewer temptations. Big maritime commercial towns, like Tyre and Acre, and Famagosta, did not exist, and country life was more developed. Certainly, the 'Chronicles of the Morea' are more edifying reading than the Letters' of Jacques de Vitry on the condition of Acre at the time of his appointment as its bishop in 1216. But in one respect Frankish Palestine and Frankish Greece present the same strange phenomenon-that union of antiquity with the Middle Ages, of the biblical and the classical with the romantic, which inspired the second part of Faust. To find the feudal system installed at Hebron and Athens, at Shechem and Sparta, at Tiberias and Thebes, to read of Princes of Galilee and of Princes of Achaia, causes surprise only surpassed by that which we should have felt in August 1914, had we been told that before four Christmases had passed, Australians and New Zealanders would have shared in the taking of Jerusalem.

WILLIAM MILLER.

Art. 8.-THE IDEALS AND ASPIRATIONS OF ITALY.

1. Laudi del Cielo, del Mare, della Terra, e degli eroi (1905); La Nave (1908); Le Canzoni della Gesta d'Oltramare (1912). By Gabriele d'Annunzio. Milan : Treves. 2. L'Altare. By Sem Benelli. Milan: Treves, 1916. ALTHOUGH the disaster at Caporetto in October last may have modified in some measure the hopes and expectations of Italy in the region of practical politics, the ideals and aspirations with which a large part of her people entered the war remain untouched. They lie too deep to be affected by the transient evolution of the present campaign, and will come to the surface again in future developments of Italian history.

Doubtless each of the nations now at war holds somewhere in the back of its mind an ideal conception of itself and of what it would wish to be. Some of them, perhaps, are hardly conscious of its presence; others possess a very clear-cut notion of their ideal and its aims. This ideal concept has no very close or direct connexion with the practical politics of the race; it is not the measure of what the nations actually hope to achieve. But it is the dream that lies behind their whole attitude and action, it is the master-light of all their being,' the very root and ground and habitat of their patriotism, the spirit which upholds and cherishes and has power to make' them endure and forget the groans and sufferings which inevitably mark the via dolorosa of their destiny. Without some such ideal conception of themselves, could the nations face and overcome the agonies by which they are now affronted? And so, too, of their ideal aims and aspirations; never, perhaps, to be realised, yet consciously or unconsciously moulding the type and forming the character which the race shall produce:

All that I longed to be,

And was not, comforts me.'

'Comforts'-yes, and indeed creates.

In this country we have not personified England' as 'France' and 'Italy' are personified for the Frenchman and the Italian. It is the country,' the land and the people blended, which claim and win the love and the