We cannot certainly judge of passages like these by the standard of our present modes of European thought and action. There may be circumstances under which these apparent air-bubbles become ponderable realities. In dealing, for instance, with the Emperor of China, the slightest abandonment of a point of etiquette might involve the most serious consequences, and the concession of a diplomatist could perhaps only be retrieved by the guns of an admiral. At the worst we might smile at the pedantic tenacity of the courts of Vienna or Versailles of the seventeenth century on points of ceremonial and precedence, but no such considerations can temper the indignation which the perusal of Sobieski’s letters excites, at the practical and substantial ingratitude and neglect he experienced at the hands of Austria from the moment that his services ceased to be indispensable. That some quarrels and jealousies should arise from the juxtaposition of the Sclavonic and Teutonic elements was perhaps inevitable. To be cheated, starved, and neglected, is usually the lot of armies serving in the territory of an ally whom they cannot openly coerce and pillage; but the Polish sovereign had to endure more than this. His sick were denied boats to remove them down the river from the pestilential atmosphere of the camp; his dead, even the officers, were denied burial in the public cemeteries. The starving soldier who approached the town in search of provisions was threatened to be fired upon. The baggage, including that of the King, was pillaged—the horses of stragglers on their road to rejoin the army carried off by force—men on guard over the guns they had taken, robbed of their effects; and every complaint treated with cold neglect and every requisition dismissed almost without an answer. The royal tents, which before the battle, though, as the King observes, spacious enough, could not contain the throng of distinguished visitors, were now deserted, and the demeanour of the Duke of Lorraine himself and every other Austrian authority, showed that this treatment was deliberate and systematic. It may have been some satisfaction to Sobieski, it almost becomes one to his admirers now, to find that the Austrian government was impartial in its ingratitude, and exercised on others, besides the Poles, its singular talent for disgusting and offending those who had done it service. The Elector of Saxony, as we have seen, lost no time in withdrawing his person and his troops. The father Aviano departed for Italy, disgusted with the intrigues of the court and the licence of the camp. The Duke of Saxe Lauenburg retired, offended by the only instance in which the Emperor appears to have shown a creditable sense of his obligations. The hero of the defence, Count Stahremberg, was justly rewarded with 100,000 crowns, the golden fleece, and the rank of field-marshal. The Duke of Saxe Lauenburg, who had held high command in the late action, considered himself ill-used