rd God. In
this very hour our fleet has engaged the Turkish, and is victorious." As
the treasurer went out, he saw him fall on his knees before the altar in
thankfulness and joy."

The great writer, from whom we have taken the above account of St. Pius
the Fifth's supernatural knowledge of the victory, remarks "that the
victories gained over the Turks since are but the complements and the
reverberations of the overthrow at Lepanto."

Here we may take leave of the hero of Lepanto, leaving him in the midst
of his glory, receiving the thanks of Christendom, from the lips of a
Saint--its Supreme Pontiff. We need not follow Don John of Austria on
his expedition against Tunis--a barren conquest his too imaginative mind
dreamed of converting into a great African empire. Nor need we follow
him when he goes, disguised as a Moorish page, accompanied by a single
cavalier, to undertake the bootless task of pacifying the revolted
Netherlands. The incidents and intrigues of this task rather belong to
the history of the Low Countries than to the story of our hero. In the
midst of them, worn out by too ardent a spirit, or stricken by an
epidemic, Don John expired, in his camp near Namur, at the early age of
thirty-two, on October 1, 1578. The task of saving a part of the
revolted provinces to the Spanish crown, he left to the strong arm and
genius of his cousin Alexander Farnese.

Don John's desire was to be buried beside his father in Spain. His body,
says Strada, was dismembered and secretly carried across France, onwards
to Madrid, where it was, as it were, reconstructed and decked with armor
to be shown to Philip, who might well weep at such ghastly display. The
heart of the hero is kept, to this day, behind the high altar of the
Cathedral of Namur.

Generous, high-spirited, courageous, he was a true knight-errant, 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." Endowed with a brilliant
imagination, he dreamed of founding an African empire, and it faded away
as the mirage of some oasis amid the deserts of the dark continent. With
his sword, he thought to free, some day, Mary Queen of Scots, from her
prison, and to place her on the throne held by Elizabeth. But the object
of his ravings died on the scaffold, while he himself passed away,
leaving behind him little more for history to record