he was received with the characteristic politeness of the nation.  Two thousand of the richest citizens of Paris, armed and on horseback, came forth to meet him; and at the gates he was welcomed as a brother by Charles VI., who saluted him with a cordial embrace.  He was clothed in a robe of white silk, and mounted on a milk-white steed—­a circumstance of great importance in the French ceremonial, white being considered as the emblem of sovereignty.  He was lodged in the Louvre, and a succession of feasts and balls, varied by the pleasures of the chase, was got up for his amusement.  Having satisfied his curiosity, but without any prospect of assistance, he resolved to visit England.  In his progress from Dover, he was entertained at Canterbury by the prior and monks of St Austin; and on Blackheath Henry IV. saluted the Greek hero, who for several days was honoured and treated in London as Emperor of the East.  Having failed in the object of his journey, he returned to Constantinople (1402), and was allowed to finish his reign in prosperity and peace in 1425.

In his declining age, he had appointed as his associate his eldest son John, the second of the name.  The corruptions of the church, divided between two popes, and the disputes of the clergy, afforded him ample scope for the exercise of his religious zeal, and it was to heal these ecclesiastical schisms that he undertook a voyage to Italy.  But the downfall of his race and of the Grecian dynasty was approaching.  At his decease (1448), there were five princes of the imperial house; but the death of Andronicus, and the monastic profession of Isidore, had reduced them to three—­Constantine, Demetrius, and Thomas.  Constantine ascended the vacant throne, the factious opposition of his brothers having been appeased by the interposition of the empress-mother, the senate, the soldiers, and the clergy, who allowed them the possession of the Morea.

The first act of the new emperor was to despatch an embassy to Georgia to bring home a princess whom he had chosen for his royal consort.  His next care was to inquire into the state of public affairs, which had been completely neglected by the weakness or absence of his predecessor.  But the imperial drama had reached its last act.  The danger which had long brooded over the doomed house of the Palaeologi was ready to burst in resistless fury upon the city of the Caesars.  Mohammed ii. had vowed to become master of Constantinople, and vast were the preparations and the implements of war which he had provided for its capture or its destruction.  The story of the siege need not here be told; nowhere has it been recorded with more picturesque and energetic brevity than in the glowing pages of Gibbon.  Operations were carried on with unprecedented vigour and effect, rendered more terrible by the lavish use of gunpowder and artillery, then almost new elements in the art of war.  Constantine did all that a Christian prince and a brave general could do.  By his example