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Alexiad, chap. iii. book xv. This much we have deemed it our duty to quote, in justice to the fair historian; we will extract also her description of the Emperor's death, and are not unwilling to allow, that the character assigned to the Princess by our own Gibbon, has in it a great deal of fairness and of truth.
Twenty knights have already announced their coming, sheathed in armour of steel, inlaid with gold, bearing this proud greeting: 'Let the Emperor of Greece, and his lieutenants, understand that Hugo, Earl of Vermandois, is approaching his territories. See his notes on the Alexiad. He bears the blessed banner of St.
Ducange, as is mentioned in the novel, identifies the church, thus described by the crusader, with that of Our Lady of Soissons, of which a French poet of the days of Louis VII. says Veiller y vont encore li Pelerin Cil qui bataille veulent fere et fournir. DUCANGE in Alexiad, p. 86.
Anna Comnena appears to have considered it her duty to take up the task which her husband had not lived to complete; and hence the Alexiad certainly, with all its defects, the first historical work that has as yet proceeded from a female pen.
A passage in the Alexiad quoted in Walter Scott's "Robert of Paris" reads: "As for the multitude of those who advanced toward the great city let it be enough to say, that they were as the stars in the heaven or as the sand of the seashore. They were in the words of Homer, as many as the leaves and flowers of spring." This figurative description is almost literally true.
She appears to have written the Alexiad in a convent; and to have spent nearly thirty years in this retirement, before her book was published. For accurate particulars of the public events touched on in Robert of Paris, the reader is referred to the above quoted author, chapters xlviii. xlix. and l.; and to the first volume of Mills' History of the Crusades. J. G. L. London, 1st March, 1833.
Some notes, chiefly extracts from the books which he had been observed to consult while dictating this novel, are now appended to its pages; and in addition to what the author had given in the shape of historical information respecting the principal real persons introduced, the reader is here presented with what may probably amuse him, the passage of the Alexiad, in which Anna Comnena describes the incident which originally, no doubt, determined Sir Walter's choice of a hero.
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