Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/398

392 == THE HERO OF LEPANTO AND HIS TIMES. ==

the marked leaning of the literary world towards biographies during the present century, our English writers had let 1900 come wellnigh upon them without their presenting us with a life of the hero of Lepanto. Now that the void has been ably filled, it is easy to perceive after the event what a fruitful field it was which was left for so long unworked. For it is not only as a conqueror and a prominent historical figure that Don John of Austria interests us. His career was run when the ten centuries of darkness had just closed; and the actions and circumstances of it – apart from wars, politics, and religions – are admirably illustrative of the social and moral condition of that attractive period. The curtain was already falling on the eld of fable, tradition, and twilight chronicle when he came upon the scene; and attending his few but eventful days appeared the day-spring of history, the dawn of the arts, the renaissance of poetry with its civilising influence. At the same time there lay upon Europe enough of middle-age shadow to prolong the waning empire of those cherished unrealities which are the province of romance, and which lend such delicious enchantment to days of old. A figure better worth exhibiting faithfully and particularly is not to be lighted on at every epoch.

There were, no doubt, sufficient reasons why the writing of the life of this illustrious personage by a British author was postponed; and one of these probably was, that the great historical events of which he was a great part have been amply recounted to us. But who, after feeding full of the stories of heroic achievements and of events big with the future of nations and races, can rise from his study without a yearning to know the personal story of one whose appearances in the great tableaux of the past have created such thrilling emotion? One of our foremost poets names in the same line,

"Actium, Lepanto, fatal Trafalgar!"

If these sea-fights deserve to be ranked together, one of them certainly may complain of some discourtesy on the part of posterity. We have abundant knowledge of them who led at Actium. Of the hero of Trafalgar English pens have not failed to register the minutest particulars, which English minds still receive with almost the devotion due to sacred writings; but somehow English curiosity concerning the life of him who led the Christian fleets at Lepanto and broke the power of the dreaded Turk has, until lately, been patient. Looking into Maunder's 'Universal Biography,' we find under the word Austrea the following notice: "D. Juan, a Spanish admiral, born in 1545; remembered as the conqueror of the Turks at Lepanto." A scant account this of a man who took a prominent part in the most important European affairs of his generation; whose praise was hymned by poets and told out by orators and authors far and near; who was without co-rival

"The glass of fashion, and the mould of form, The observed of all observers;"

to whom the Vicar of Christ thought it proper to apply the