Vili.] TUE LEVANTINE KINGDOMS. l8l rather than by the winning of high aims. That the good they did was largely leavened with evil may be said of every war that has ever been waged ; that bad men rose by them while good men fell is, and must be, true wherever and whenever the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong. But that in the end they were a benefit to the world no one who reads can doubt ; and that in their course they brought out a love for all that is heroic in human nature, the love of freedom, the honour of prowess, sympathy with sorrow, perseverance to the last, and patient endurance without hope, the chronicles of the age abundantly prove ; proving, moreover, that it was by the experience of those times that the forms of those virtues were realised and presented to posterity. This much I say, by way of a caution, that you may not accuse me of an attempt to impose upon you. The history of the Crusades has always had for me an interest that quite rivals all the interest I could take in the history of the Greeks and Romans ; and very much of that interest is of the same sort ; a half archaeological interest in a life and growth from which we have ourselves received some great impulses, but almost all the minutiae of which are important only through their connexion with those great impulses. Such a half archaeological interest I hope you "may feel in the history of medieval Cyprus, and what little is to be told of its sister kingdom. The last decade of the twelfth century saw the establishment of two small Christian kingdoms in the Levant, which long outlived all other relics of the Crusades except the military orders ; and which, with very little help from the West, sustained a hazardous existence in complete contrast with almost everything around them. The kingdoms of Cyprus and Armenia have a history very closely intertwined, but their origin and most of their circumstances were very different.