regenerated into a new and practical life.

That great event was the Crusades. We have heard little of Alexandria
lately. Its intellectual glory had departed westward and eastward, to
Cordova and to Bagdad; its commercial greatness had left it for Cairo
and Damietta. But Egypt was still the centre of communication between
the two great stations of the Moslem power, and indeed, as Mr. Lane has
shown in his most valuable translation of the "Arabian Nights,"
possessed a peculiar life and character of its own.

It was the rash object of the Crusaders to extinguish that life.
Palestine was their first point of attack: but the later Crusaders seem
to have found, like the rest of the world, that the destinies of
Palestine could not be separated from those of Egypt; and to Damietta,
accordingly, was directed that last disastrous attempt of St. Louis,
which all may read so graphically described in the pages of Joinville.

The Crusaders failed utterly of the object at which they aimed. They
succeeded in an object of which they never dreamed; for in those
Crusades the Moslem and the Christian had met face to face, and found
that both were men, that they had a common humanity, a common eternal
standard of nobleness and virtue. So the Christian knights went home
humbler and wiser men, when they found in the Saracen emirs the same
generosity, truth, mercy, chivalrous self-sacrifice, which they had
fancied their own peculiar possession, and added to that, a civilisation
and a learning which they could only admire and imitate. And thus, from
the era of the Crusades, a kindlier feeling sprang up between the
Crescent and the Cross, till it was again broken by the fearful
invasions of the Turks throughout Eastern Europe. The learning of the
Moslem, as well as their commerce, began to pour rapidly into