[Illustration:  CARRACK IN WHICH THE KNIGHTS ARRIVED AT MALTA, 1530.]

In many, nay, in most campaigns, personal feeling enters but little into the contest.  Nationality strikes against nationality, army against army, or navy against navy; but no burning hatred of his adversary animates the breast of the combatant on either side; it may even be said that frequently some pity for the vanquished is felt, when all is over, by the side which has conquered.  At Malta the element of actual personal individual hatred was the mainspring by which the combatants on both sides were moved; each regarded the other as an infidel, the slaying of whom was the sacrifice most acceptable to the God they worshipped.  “Infidel” was the term which each hurled at the other; to destroy the infidel, root and branch, was the act imposed upon those whose faith was the one only passport to a blessed eternity, and those who fell in the strife, whether Christian or Moslem, felt assured that for them the gates of heaven stood wide open.  Great as were those others who perished, faithful to the death as were those noble knights who died to a man in the culminating agony of St. Elmo, adroit, resourceful, master of himself and others as was the famous Dragut, there is one name and one alone that shines like a beacon light upon a hill-top when we think of the siege of Malta.  Jean Parisot de la Valette, whose name is enshrined for ever in that noble city which crowns Mount Sceberass at the present day, was the forty-eighth Grand Master of the Noble Order of the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem the charter for which, contained in the original Bull of Pope Paschal II., dated 1113 (in which the Holy Father took the Order under his special protection), may be seen to this day in the armoury of the palace at Valetta.  At the time when the supreme honour was conferred upon him, in the year 1557, he had passed through every grade of the Order:  as soldier, captain, general, Counsellor, Grand Cross:  in all of them displaying a valour, a piety, a self-abnegation beyond all praise, A man of somewhat austere manner, he exacted from others that which he gave himself—­a whole-hearted devotion to the Order to which he had consecrated his life.  Fearing no man in the Council Chamber, even as he feared no foe in the field, he ever spoke his mind in defence of that which he deemed to be right.  Proud, with the dignity becoming a man of his ancient lineage, he merged all personal haughtiness in the zeal he felt in upholding the rights and privileges of that splendid confederation of knights of the best blood in Europe over which he had been called upon to preside at the mature age of sixty-three.  There is no instance in history of any man more absolutely single-minded than La Valette; that in which he believed he cherished with an ardour almost incredible in these days, and that the sword of the Lord had been confided into his hand for the utter extermination and extirpation of the Moslem heresy was the leading feature in his