he Turks in the East,
and the long centuries of their triumph which lay in prospect, to record
a prophecy, old in his time, relating to the North, to the effect that
in the last days the Russians should be masters of Constantinople. When
it was uttered no one knows; but it was written on an equestrian statue,
in his day one of the special monuments of the Imperial City, which had
one time been brought thither from Antioch. That statue, whether of
Christian or pagan origin is not known, has a name in history, for it
was one of the works of art destroyed by the Latins in the taking of
Constantinople; and the prediction engraven on it bears at least a
remarkable evidence of the congruity in itself, if I may use the word;
of that descent of the North upon Constantinople, which, though not as
yet accomplished, generation after generation grows more probable.

It is now a thousand years since this famous prophecy has been
illustrated by the actual incursions of the Russian hordes. Such was the
date of their first expedition against Constantinople; their assaults
continued through two centuries; and, in the course of that period, they
seemed to be nearer the capture of the city than they have been at any
time since. They descended the Dnieper in boats, coasted along the East
of the Black Sea, and so came round by Trebizond to the Bosphorus,
plundering the coast as they advanced. At one time their sovereign had
got possession of Bulgaria, to the south of the Danube. Barbarians of
other races flocked to his standard; he found himself surrounded by the
luxuries of the East and West, and he marched down as far as Adrianople,
and threatened to go further. Ultimately he was defeated; then followed
the conversion of his people to Christianity, which for a period
restrained their barbarous rapacity; after this, for two centuries, they
were under the yoke and bondage of the Tartars; but the prophecy, or
rather the omen, remains, and the whole world has learned to acquiesce
in the probability of its fulfilment. The wonder rather is, that that
fulfilment has been so long delayed. The Russians, whose wishes would
inspire their hopes, are not solitary in their anticipations: the
historian from whom I have borrowed this sketch of their past
attempts,[90] writing at the end of last century, records his own
expectation of the event. "Perhaps," he says, "the present generation
may yet behold the accomplishment of a rare prediction, of which the