say, was "a dissembler, a wolf in sheep's clothing, an Antichrist before the final Antichrist, transformed, like Satan, into an angel of light." It was Mahomet's perfidy and cunning, more than his other vices, which seem to have scandalised the Greeks of his time. The Latin archbishop of Mitylene, Leonard of Chios, writing the story of the fall of the city three months afterwards in a letter addressed to the pope, saw in him the unmistakable instrument of Divine vengeance on those perverse Greeks who would not let themselves be cordially united to Rome. If the Greeks deserved their doom ever so much, we at any rate must number their conqueror among "the destroyers rightly called, and plagues of men."
There would seem to be no good reason for classing Mahomet with the few men of first-rate military genius who have appeared in the world. His great achievement, the conquest of Constantinople, was comparatively easy with the vast resources at his command. The way, as we have seen, had been thoroughly well prepared for him, and he had only to put a finishing stroke to a work which had long been in progress. While we may fairly credit him with immense energy and boundless ambition, we cannot justly compare him with an Alexander, a Cæsar, or a Hannibal. "He was," says Gibbon, "doubtless a soldier and possibly a general," and beyond this he does not seem worthy to be extolled. His conquests no doubt were on a considerable scale, and are said with Oriental exaggeration to have embraced ten kingdoms and two hundred cities. He certainly annexed
