Great leaders: Historic portraits from the great historians

Every one perusing the pages of the historians must have been impressed with the graphic and singularly penetrative character of many of the sketches of the distinguished person...

[A distinguished statesman, who built up and consolidated the power of Athens immediately after the Persian wars, born 495 B.C., died 429. His career was contemporaneous with th...

In respect of intelligence and combining genius, Alexander was Hellenic to the full; in respect of disposition and purpose, no one could be less Hellenic. The acts attesting his...

Marius was continued in office, and was a fourth time consul. He had completed his military reforms, and the army was now a professional service with regular pay. Trained corps...

His conquest of the pirates was effected with wonderful rapidity, and cemented by a merciful policy, which, instead of taking vengeance for the past, accomplished the prevention...

The justice, the modesty, the unwearied application of Trajan were deservedly celebrated, no less than his valor in war and his conduct in political affairs. But a great part of...

The person as well as the mind of Constantine had been enriched by Nature with her choicest endowments. His stature was lofty, his countenance majestic, his deportment graceful;...

The same province, and, perhaps, the same city, which had given to the throne the virtues of Trajan and the talents of Hadrian, was the original seat of another family of Spania...

Among the circumstances which contributed most strongly to his success were the kindness which his adversaries met with at his hands, and the strict discipline which he maintain...

I have, however, already observed that Charlemagne had other rules or habits of conduct which were the indigenous growth of his own mind. It was only in a mind of surpassing dep...

Olaf Tryggveson, though his kingdom was the smallest of the Norse three, had risen to a renown over all the Norse world, which neither he of Denmark nor he of Sweden could prete...

The Conquest was hardly over when the struggle between the baronage and the crown began. The wisdom of William’s policy in the destruction of the great earldoms which had oversh...

Nor was Saladin long content with the possession of Egypt; he despoiled the Christians of Jerusalem, and the Atabeks of Damascus, Aleppo, and Diarbekir; Mecca and Medina acknowl...

When a thunderstorm once forced the king, as he was rowing on the Thames, to take refuge at the palace of the Bishop of Durham, Earl Simon of Montfort, who was a guest of the pr...

Names that to fear were never known, Bold Norfolk’s Earl de Brotherton And Oxford’s famed De Vere; Ross, Montague, and Manly came, And Courtney’s pride and Percy’s fame, Names k...

While Petrarch indulged these prophetic visions the Roman hero was fast declining from the meridian of fame and power; and the people who had gazed with astonishment on the asce...

The policy of the French court detained her while the cities of the north of France opened their gates to the newly consecrated king. Bedford, however, who had been left without...

We now visit San Gemignano in order to study some fading frescoes of Gozzoli and Ghirlandajo, or else for the sake of its strange feudal towers, tall pillows of brown stone, cro...

The year 1503 proved an eventful one for him. No longer contented with his duchy, he prepared to attack Bologna and to threaten Florence. The day before he set forth on this gre...

This spirit of knight-errantry might lead us to under-value his talents as a general, and to regard him merely in the light of a lucky adventurer. But this would be doing him in...

[Don Inigo Lopez de Recalde de Loyola, born in 1491, died in 1556. The scion of one of the noblest families in Spain, he was courtier and soldier till he was severely wounded in...

Could a single phantom have risen from one of the many thousand graves where human beings had been thrust alive by his decree, perhaps there might have been an answer to the que...

Ghent, saved twice by the policy, the eloquence, the self-sacrifices of Orange, fell within three months of his murder into the hands of Parma. The loss of this most important c...

The duke’s military fame was unquestionable when he came to the provinces, and both in stricken fields and in long campaigns he showed how thoroughly it had been deserved; yet h...

[Daughter of James V of Scotland and Mary of Lorraine, a princess of the Guise family of France, born 1542, died 1587. As great-granddaughter of Henry VII of England, Mary was h...

The peace of Arnay-le-Duc succeeded, and then the fatal Bartholomew marriage with the Messalina of Valois. The faith taught in the mountains of Béarn was no buckler against the...

For, in justice, it must be admitted that the pens which have traced the history of this extraordinary man are not untinged with partiality, and that the treachery of the duke,...

His ill-disguised attempts upon the Electorate of Mentz, which he first intended to bestow upon the Elector of Brandenburg, as the dower of his daughter Christina, and afterward...

The Protector’s foreign policy at the same time extorted the ungracious approbation of those who most detested him. The Cavaliers could scarcely refrain from wishing that one wh...

His personal tastes were those rather of a warrior than of a statesman, but he, like his great-grandfather, the silent prince who founded the Batavian commonwealth, occupies a f...

Beyond comparison the greatest of English generals, Marlborough raised his country to a height of military glory such as it had never attained since the days of Poitiers and of...

In society he had the weakness of wishing to be thought a man of gallantry and fashion, and his awkward addresses, rendered the more ludicrous by a singularly corpulent and ungr...

He loved England with an intense and personal love. He believed in her power, her glory, her public virtue, till England learned to believe in herself. Her triumphs were his tri...

Perhaps the most difficult question, however, was the appointment of a commander-in-chief; and on no other subject did the Congress exhibit more conspicuous wisdom. When only tw...

Charles James Fox was the third son of the first Lord Holland, the old rival of Pitt. He had entered Parliament irregularly and illegally in November, 1768, when he had not yet...

Never was character more opposite to that of the Russian autocrat than that of his great coadjutor in the pacification and settlement of Europe, Prince Talleyrand. This most rem...

Now, his first passion, his principal passion, is literary vanity. Never was the chief of a party, sect, or government, even at critical moments, such an incurable, insignifican...

[Emperor of France, born in Corsica 1769, died a prisoner on the island of St. Helena in 1821. Educated at the military schools of Brienne and Paris, Napoleon became a sous-lieu...

A constant recollection of these circumstances, and of the peculiar and very difficult task which was committed to his charge, is necessary in forming a correct estimate of the...

“The latest dates have been given. _The geographical notes which accompany the historical incidents are a novel addition, and exceedingly helpful._ The size also commends it, ma...