Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 2.djvu/519

CANTO IV.] thank the Almighty, who had enabled an infirm, unarmed old man to subdue a terrible and potent sovereign.

5.

The reader will recollect the exclamation of the Highlander, "Oh, for one hour of Dundee!" Henry Dandolo, when elected Doge, in 1192, was eighty-five years of age. When he commanded the Venetians at the taking of Constantinople, he was consequently ninety-seven years old. At this age he annexed the fourth and a half of the whole empire of Romania, for so the Roman empire was then called, to the title and to the territories of the Venetian Doge. The three-eighths of this empire were preserved in the diplomas until the Dukedom of Giovanni Dolfino, who made use of the above designation in the year 1357.

Dandolo led the attack on Constantinople in person. Two ships, the Paradise and the Pilgrim, were tied together, and a drawbridge or ladder let down from their higher yards to