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.