have rendered further resistance impossible, withdrew his forces; not however, as was expected, in the direction of Neustadt and Vienna. He marched, on the contrary, up the course of the Mur, by roads of the most difficult and harassing description; and, establishing himself in Styria, sat down before Gratz, which, after a tedious siege, he took and ransacked, but failed to reduce the citadel. Some writers are of opinion that this diversion of his force, in fact a circuitous retreat, was the work of the Vizier Ibrahim, who had been bribed by Charles V. Nothing has been discovered in the Austrian archives which contain the state secrets of the time, and no passage has been detected by such inquirers as Von Hammer in the pages of Turkish history to favour this supposition. The bribe also must have been a large one which could have influenced the conduct of a man who had the treasure of the seven towers at his disposal. A far more natural cause may be assigned for the movements of the Sultan. The relative position of the two parties was very different from that of 1529. It is true the frontier provinces were, as then, exposed to the first onset of the invader; but the preparations of the House of Austria for defence were further advanced, better organized, and on a more respectable scale than before. The Emperor Charles in person had put himself at the head of the troops of the Empire, and had well employed the interval of security which the delay of the Sultan before the town of Güns had afforded him. With an army rated at 260,000 men, of which however only 126,000 were combatants, namely, 96,000 infantry and 30,000 cavalry, he lay encamped at no great distance from Vienna. In his former campaign Soliman had sought in vain for the accursed Ferdinand, and had made much of his disappointment in the bulletins from his camp and in the pages of his servile historiographers. He was probably not equally desirous of falling in with such an antagonist as Charles, at the head of an untouched force of this magnitude. The sudden direction of his army upon provinces bare of troops, but which contained plunder to be gathered, and villages to be burned, and helpless people to be slaughtered, was a safe and a tempting, though inglorious proceeding. These were the motives, as far as inquiry can now detect them, which postponed to a subsequent century the great spectacle of actual collision in the field between the main armies of Turkey and the Empire. Austria meanwhile derived from the postponement of so tremendous an issue no immunity from a repetition of the horrors of the last invasion. While the main Turkish army occupied Styria, the bands of Michael Oglou were again let loose upon her plains, re-enacting, up to the walls of Lintz and Vienna, every former atrocity. If, however, they were allowed for a period thus to extend and pursue their ravages, they came at last within reach, not merely of the partial resistance by which the more adventurous of their