7--12) and Gregoras (l.ii.8, l.iii.2, 4, l.
iv.

1) with visible favor to the father of the reigning dynasty.] [Footnote 12: Acropolita (c.

50) relates the circumstances of this curious adventure, which seem to have escaped the more recent writers.] [Footnote 13: Pachymer, (l.i.c.

12,) who speaks with proper contempt of this barbarous trial, affirms, that he had seen in his youth many person who had sustained, without injury, the fiery ordeal.

As a Greek, he is credulous; but the ingenuity of the Greeks might furnish some remedies of art or fraud against their own superstition, or that of their tyrant.] But his innocence had been too unworthily treated, and his power was too strongly felt, to curb an aspiring subject in the fair field that was opened to his ambition.