and its talons resting upon two gates of Rome and Constantinople,
with (for difference) a crescent between the gates, and over all an
imperial crown. In truth this exile buried by Tamar drew his blood
direct from the loins of the great Byzantine emperors, through that
Thomas of whom Mahomet II. said, "I have found many slaves in
Peloponnesus, but this man only:" and from Theodore, through his
second son John, came the Constantines of Constantine--albeit with a
bar sinister, of which my father made small account. I believe he
held privately that a Constantine, _de stirpe imperatorum_, had no
call to concern himself with petty ceremonies of this or that of the
Church's offshoots to legitimize his blood. At any rate no bar
sinister appeared on the imperial escutcheon repeated, with
quarterings of Arundel, Mohun, Grenville, Nevile, Archdeckne,
Courtney, and, again, Arundel, on the wainscots and in the windows of
Constantine, usually with the legend _Dabit Devs His Qvoqve Finem_,
but twice or thrice with a hopefuller one, _Generis revocemvs
honores_.

Knowing him to be thus descended, you could recognize in all my
father said or did a large simplicity as of the earlier gods, and a
dignity proper to a king as to a beggar, but to no third and mean
state. A child might beard him, but no man might venture a liberty
with him or abide the rare explosions of his anger. You might even,
upon long acquaintance, take him for a great, though mad, Englishman,
and trust him as an Englishman to the end; but the soil of his nature
was that which grows the vine--volcanic, breathing through its pores
a hidden heat to answer the sun's. Whether or no there be in man a
faith to remove mountains, there is in him (and it may come to the
same thing) a fire to split them, and anon to clothe the bare rock
with tendrils and soft-scented blooms.