Luxemburg.

There stood the young conqueror of Lepanto, his brain full of schemes,
his heart full of hopes, on the threshhold of the Netherlands, at the
entrance to what he believed the most brilliant chapter of his
life--schemes, hopes, and visions--doomed speedily to fade before the
cold reality with which he was to be confronted. Throwing off his
disguise after reaching Luxemburg, the youthful paladin stood confessed.
His appearance was as romantic as his origin and his exploits. Every
contemporary chronicler, French, Spanish, Italian, Flemish, Roman, have
dwelt upon his personal beauty and the singular fascination of his
manner. Symmetrical features, blue eyes of great vivacity, and a
profusion of bright curling hair, were combined with a person not much
above middle height; but perfectly well proportioned. Owing to a natural
peculiarity of his head, the hair fell backward from the temples, and he
had acquired the habit of pushing it from his brows. The custom became a
fashion among the host of courtiers, who were but too happy to glass
themselves in so brilliant a mirror. As Charles the Fifth, on his journey
to Italy to assume the iron crown, had caused his hair to be clipped
close, as a remedy for the headaches with which, at that momentous epoch,
he was tormented, bringing thereby close shaven polls into extreme
fashion; so a mass of hair pushed backward from the temples, in the style
to which the name of John of Austria was appropriated, became the
prevailing mode wherever the favorite son of the Emperor appeared.

Such was the last crusader whom the annals of chivalry were to know; the
man who had humbled the crescent as it had not been humbled since the
days of the Tancreds, the Baldwins, the Plantagenets--yet, after all,
what was this brilliant adventurer when weighed against the tranquil
Christian champion whom he was to meet face to face? The contrast was
striking between the real and the romantic hero. Don John had pursued and
achieved glory through victories with which the world was ringing;
William was slowly compassing a country's emancipation through a series
of defeats. He moulded a commonwealth and united hearts with as much
contempt for danger as Don John had exhibited in scenes of slave driving
and carnage. Amid fields of blood, and through web's of tortuous
intrigue, the brave and subtle son of the Emperor pursued only his own
objects. Tawdry schemes of personal ambition, conquests for his own
be