Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/70

64 == MALTA AND ITS KNIGHTS. ==

is a strange irony of fate which has made the English – dubbed by the first Napoleon a nation of shopkeepers – the heirs of the haughty, fastidious, chivalric Hospitallers; and, stranger still, that the last link in the chain of circumstances which led to this unlooked-for result, was forged by the high-handed enterprise of the great Corsican himself. Nevertheless, it is unquestionably true that we are indebted in no small degree to the religious fanaticism which tempered the stern savagery of the middle ages for the possession of our great Mediterranean arsenal. The history of the Knights of the Hospital of St John at Jerusalem is the history of one of our most valuable dependencies. Many years ago General Porter contributed to our literature the best and most readable summary of the deeds of the Order in a book of which he has now published an enlarged and revised edition, with, we may hope, a prospect of a wider popularity in this age of extended reading. The subject, indeed, sparkles with many facets of interest. The medical man finds light thrown upon the early history of hospitals; the soldier reads with the same enthusiasm which Walter Scott gratefully records in reference to his early studies of the Abbé Vertot, the animated narrative of the sieges of Rhodes and Malta, the greatest leaguers of their respective epochs; and the politician is interested in a constitution alien to any other in the world's history – the autocratic authority of a military chieftain, tempered by democratic equality of the convent. Yet, after all, it is to the scene of the zenith of their glory and the decay of their spirit, that the English student of the history of the Knights Hospitallers will ever turn; so that they are in our minds, as in popular parlance, less chevaliers of Jerusalem or of Rhodes than knights of Malta. It is a slight indication of this substitution of the genius loci for the esprit de corps, that General Porter in his earlier pages appears to surrender a point which, to a genuine old miles Hierosolymitanus, would have been dearer than his own genealogical proofs, describing the dedication of the original chef lieu of the Order at Jerusalem as having been to St John the Almoner, against which degradation of the convent of the illustrious Precursor the learned Paciaude, in the work which he dedicated under Grand Master Pinto to Pope Benedict XIV. (in 1755), protests in lengthy and energetic sentences, striving to show that it was a fallacy, hatched by the envy of the Greeks. Clearly, if the Almoner appears to nineteenth century acumen the proper patron for an Order of Hospitallers, it was not long before he was altogether disowned by the fraternity, and the Baptist invested with the tradition of their earliest consecration. In St John's Church at Valetta, in addition to the famous gift of Bajazet, the hand of the Baptist, – captured by the Turks at Constantinople, whither it had History of the Knights of Malta; or, the Order of St John of Jerusalem. By Wintworth Porter, Major-General Royal Engineers. Revised edition. London: Longmans, Green, & Co.