Without doubt, Stanley 's timely intervention turned the tide, delivered the coup de grace.
Permanent greatness and secular security were within her reach at the commencement of the Vasa period; how was it, then, that at the end of that period, only fifty years later, Poland had already sunk irredeemably into much the same position as Turkey occupies now, the position of a moribund state, existing on sufferance simply because none was yet quite prepared to administer the coup de grace?
The few works which have since appeared, before the rise of the physiological school of Sir Charles Bell and Charles Darwin, are undeserving of notice, the development of phrenology having given to pure physiognomy the coup de grace by taking into itself whatever was likely to live of the older science.
Yet the coup de grace was postponed for another five years, during which time Suleiman was occupied with the conquest of Egypt and the siege of Rhodes.
What is not quite so generally known is the fact that Leopold slackened at once and would have been quite content with the results of these earlier victories had not the pope stiffened his resistance by forming a Holy League between the Emperor, Poland, Venice, Muscovy and the papacy, with the avowed object of dealing the Turk the coup de grace (March 5, 1684).
