THOMAS AQUINAS. [Vili. 204 regency, the Latin empire of Constantinople fell. AH the older medieval things were passing away ih both East and West, and the tide which had led on the Crusades was turning. The child king, Hugh II, died in 1267; and the bailiff, Hugh III, succeeded as king. Hugh II was the last of the house of Lusignan who was left in the East ; in the West there were still many members of the prolific family. Our memory recurs most naturally to that large family of the Aliens, the half-brothers of our king, Henry III, who nine years before had been banished in consequence of their opposition to the Provisions of Oxford; their father, Hugh X of Lusignan, Count of la Marche, was nephew to the Kings Guy and Amalric. Hugh of Antioch, too, the new king, represented the house of Poictiers, being sprung from Raymond of Poictiers, the uncle of Queen Eleanor, the wife of Henry II. The reigning house of Lusignan in la Marche came to an end in 1303. But although this was the case, the Cypriot dynasty continued to bear the name of Lusignan, to which by a female descent it was entitled; and there are many Lusignans, in England as elsewhere, flourishing at the present day. Hugh III, the new king, had the advantage of acquiring the throne when he had age and experience to fill it : and he •eigned fourteen years, long enough to establish his own authority, and to see the downfall of all the Frank states around him. I will mention three points only in his history; for although he bore the title of the Great, ' Hugh the Great,' it was a very forlorn hope that he was called on to lead. He seems to have been the king of Cyprus to whom S. Thomas Aquinas dedicated the famous treatise ' De Regimine Principum;' a book which, owing to the great reputation of its author and the definiteness of the principles which it enunciates, became a handbook of the relations of Church and