On the failure of these last attacks, Soliman abandoned all hope of gaining possession of the city, and the troops received accordingly a general order of retreat. Its execution was attended by an act of atrocity which throws a shadow over the character of the sovereign by whose servants it was perpetrated,—a shadow not the less deep because contrasted with many recorded indications of a noble and generous nature. It may, indeed, possibly be considered as another specimen of unavoidable condescension to the passions of an ill-disciplined soldiery, such as the massacre of the garrison of Pesth, and rather as an exhibition of the weakness than the misuse of despotic rule. The Janissaries broke up from their encampment an hour before midnight, and set on fire their huts, forage, and every combustible article which they could not or would not carry with them. Under this latter head they included the greater portion of the vast swarm of prisoners of all ages and both sexes collected in their quarters. Of these the younger portion alone, boys and girls, were dragged along with their retiring columns, tied together by ropes, and destined to slavery. The old of both sexes and the children were for the most part flung alive into the flames of the burning camp, and the remainder cut to pieces or impaled. The glare of the conflagration and the shrieks of the sufferers disturbed through the night the rest so dearly earned by the brave defenders of the city, and though their approaching deliverance might be read in the one, it was probably easy to conjecture from the other the horrors by which that deliverance was accompanied. When this act of cowardly vengeance was accomplished, a parting salvo from all their fire-arms was discharged at the walls; and after all remaining buildings in the suburbs and adjacent villages had been set on fire, the army commenced its retreat.