He was anxious to cross the river, both for the purpose of further encounter with the enemy and from the exhausted state of the country on the left bank. The passage of the river was effected on the 4th or 5th October. The troops, during their occupation of the rich island of the Schütt, had been better supplied with forage and provisions, but had suffered dreadfully from the various forms of contagious and deadly disease for which the autumnal climate of Hungary is notorious. Sobieski remarks that the Germans, generally more delicate than the Poles, suffered less by the prevalent fever which decimated officers and men in his own army. He describes his own people as dissatisfied with the rich wines of Hungary, and pining for their beer and smoky cottages. Drunkenness, it would appear, was a preservative against the prevalent fever, and possibly the Poles were less addicted than the Germans to this prophylactic. Many Polish officers of distinction were swept off. The Turks, meanwhile, were little in condition to take advantage of Austrian delays, or Polish sickness, for the purpose of stemming the tide of victory and pursuit. Detractors from the reputation of Sobieski have not been wanting to censure the laxity of the pursuit, and to ascribe it to the attractions of the Vizier’s tents. That he was fond of money his admirers have not denied. His apologists have alleged in his defence, on this head, the temptation to which the holder of a life interest in a crown is exposed to accumulate wealth for those descendants who on his decease may sink into a private station. Perhaps a law of celibacy would be no unreasonable condition of elective sovereignty. No female reader of his letters will, however, blame the complacency with which he describes the treasures destined for the boudoir of the wife whom he styles “his incomparable,” but who appears, by her taste for dress and intrigue, to have been very comparable indeed to many of her countrywomen. It is unnecessary to detail the many circumstances which must have made an active and immediate pursuit of the flying foe a military impossibility. It is sufficient to point to the forest defiles through which the allied force had toiled for three weary days from the Danube to the heights of the Kahlenberg, during which time the horses had fed on nothing but the leaves of the trees which impeded their progress. The Vizier’s first halt was under the walls of Raab; his first reassertion of his authority, which, in the confusion of defeat and flight, had been in abeyance, was to select a man he hated as an expiatory victim. The veteran Pacha of Pesth, whose original counsels, if followed, would have probably led to less fatal results, was ready to his hand. This old and distinguished man, with two other Pachas and the Aga of the Janissaries, were beheaded on a charge of cowardice, and some fifty other officers of less note strangled. After a halt of three days, employed in such proceedings as