d Progress.' Were you pleased with your tour?"

_Author_. "I think that your Highness has one of the most romantic
principalities in Europe. Without the grandeur of the Alps, Servia has
more than the beauty of the Apennines."

_Prince_. "The country is beautiful, but I wish to see agriculture
prosper."

_Author_. "I am happy to hear that: your highness's father had a great
name as a soldier; I hope that your rule will be distinguished by
rapid advancement in the arts of civilization; that you will be the
Kara Georg of peace."

This led to a conversation relative to the late Kara Georg; and the
prince rising, led me into another apartment, where the portrait of
his father, the duplicate of one painted for the emperor Alexander,
hung from the wall. He was represented in the Turkish dress, and wore
his pistols in his girdle; the countenance expressed not only
intelligence but a certain refinement, which one would scarcely expect
in a warrior peasant: but all his contemporaries agree in representing
him to have possessed an inherent superiority and nobility of nature,
which in any station would have raised him above his equals.

CHAPTER XXIX.

A Memoir of Kara Georg.

The Turkish conquest was followed by the gradual dispersion or
disappearance of the native nobility of Servia, the last of whom, the
Brankovitch, lived as _despots_ in the castle of Semendria, up to the
beginning of the eighteenth century; so that at this moment scarcely a
single representative of the old stock is to be found.[22]

The nobility of Bosnia, occupying the middle region between the sphere
of the Eastern and Western churches, were in a state of religious
indifference, although nominally Catholic; and in order to preserve
their lands and influence, accepted Islamism _en masse_; they and the
Albanians being the only instances, in all the wars of the Moslems, of
a European nobility embracing the Mohamedan faith in a body. Chance
might have given the Bosniacs a leader of energy and military talents.
In that case, these men, instead of now wearing turbans in their grim
feudal castles, might, frizzed and perfumed, be waltzing in pumps; and
Shakespear and Mozart might now be delighting the citizens assembled
in the Theatre Royal Seraievo!

The period preceding the second siege of Vienna was the spring-tide of
Islam conquest. After this event, in 1684, began the ebb. Hungary was
lost to the Porte, and six years afterwards thirty-seven th