came the arbiter even of Imperial elections. The country on which the armies lived was soon eaten up by their rapine. Hence the feebleness of the operations, the absence of anything which Von Moltke would call strategy and hence again the cruel length of the war, a whole generation of German

agony.

But if the war was weak, not so were the warriors. On the Imperial side especially, they were types of a class of men the most terrible perhaps, as well as the vilest, who ever plied the soldier's trade: of those mercenary bands, soldados, in the literal and original sense of the term, free companions, condottieri, lansquenets, who came between the feudal militia and the standing armies of modern times. In the wars of Italy and the Low Countries under Alva and Parma and Freundsberg, these men had opened new abysses of cruelty and lust in human nature. They were the lineal representatives of the Great Companies which ravaged France in the time of Edward III. They were near of kin to the buccaneers, and Scott's Bertram Risingham is the portrait of a lansquenet as well as of a rover of the Spanish Main. Many of them were Croats, a race well known through all history in the ranks of Austrian tyranny, and Walloons, a name synonymous with that of hired butcher and marauder. But with Croats and Walloons were mingled Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, outcasts of every land, bearing the devil's stamp on faces of every complexion, blaspheming in all European and some nonEuropean tongues. Their only country was Their only country was the camp; their cause booty; their king the bandit general who contracted for their blood. Of attachment to religious principle they had usually just enough to make them prefer murdering and plundering in the name of the Virgin to murdering and plundering in the name of the Gospel; but outcasts of all nominal creeds were found together in their camps. Even the dignity of hatred

was wanting to their conflicts, for they changed sides without scruple, and the comrade of yesterday was the foeman of to-day, and again the comrade of the morrow. The only moral salt which kept the carcass of their villainy from rotting was a military code of honour, embodying the freemasonry of the soldier's trade, and having as one of its articles the duel with all the forms-an improvement at all events upon assassination. A stronger contrast there cannot be than that between these men and the citizen soldiers whom Germany the other day sent forth to defend their country and their hearths. The soldier had a language of his own, polyglot as the elements of the band, and garnished with unearthly oaths: and the void left by religion in his soul was filled with wild superstitions, bullet charming and spells against bullets, and the natural reflection in dark hearts of the blind chance which since the introduction of firearms seemed to decide the soldier's fate. Having no home but the camp, he carried with him his family, a she wolf and her cubs, cruel and marauding as himself; and the numbers and unwieldiness of every army were doubled by a train of waggons full of women and children sitting on heaps of booty. It was not, we may guess, as ministering angels that these women went among the wounded after a battle. The chiefs made vast fortunes. Common soldiers sometimes drew a great prize; left the standard for a time and lived like princes; but the fiend's gold soon found its way back to the giver through the Jews who prowled in the wake of war, or at the gambling table which was the central object in every camp. When fortune smiled, when pay was good, when a rich city had been stormed, the soldier's life was in its way a merry one; his camp was full of roystering revelry; he, his lady and his charger glittered with not overtasteful finery, the lady sometimes with finery stripped from the altars. Then, glass in hand he might joyously cry, "The sharp

sword is my farm and plundering is my plough; earth is my bed, the sky my covering, this cloak is my house, this wine my paradise;" or chant the doggerel stave which said that when a soldier was born three boons were given him, one to find him food, another to find him a comely lass, a third to go to perdition in his stead.' But when the country had been eaten up, when the burghers held the city stoutly, when the money-kings refused to advance the war-kings any more gold, the soldier shared the miseries which he inflicted, and, unless he was of iron, sank under his hardships, unpitied by his stronger comrades; for the rule of that world was war to the weak. Terrible then were the mutinies, fearful was the position of the commander. We cannot altogether resist the romance which attaches to the life of these men, many a one among whom could have told a tale as wild as that with which Othello, the hero of their tribe, won his Desdemona, in whose love he finds the countercharm of his wandering life. But what sort of war such a soldiery made, may be easily imagined. Its treatment of the people and the country wherever it marched, as minutely described by trustworthy witnesses, was literally fiendish. Germany did not recover the effects for two hundred years.

A century had passed since the first preaching of Luther. Jesuitism, working from its great seminary at Ingoldstadt, and backed by Austria, had won back many, especially among the princes and nobility, to the Church of Rome: but in the main the Germans, like the other Teutons, were still Protestant even in the hereditary domains of the House of Austria. The rival religions stood facing each other within the nominal unity of the Empire, in a state of uneasy truce and compromise; questions about ecclesiastical domains and religious privileges, still open; formularies styled of concord proving formularies of discord; no mediating authority being able to make church authority and

liberty of private judgment, Reaction and Progress, the Spirit of the Past and the Spirit of the Future lie down in real peace together. The Protestants had formed an Evangelical Union, their opponents a Catholic League, of which Maximilian, elector of Bavaria, a pupil of the Jesuits, was chief. The Protestants were ill prepared for the struggle. There was fatal division between the Lutherans and the Calvinists, Luther himself having said in his haste that he hated a Calvinist more than a Papist. The great Protestant princes were lukewarm and weakkneed: like the Tudor nobility of England, they clung much more firmly to the lands which they had taken from the Catholics than to the faith in the name of which the lands were taken; and as powers of order, naturally alarmed by the disorders which attended the great religious revolution, they were politically inclined to the Imperial side. The lesser nobility and gentry, staunch Protestants for the most part, had shown no capacity for vigorous and united action since their premature attempt under Arnold Von Sickingen. On the peasantry, also staunch Protestants, still weighed the reaction produced by the Peasant's war and the excesses of the Anabaptists. In the free cities there was a strong burgher element ready to fight for Protestantism and liberty; but even in the free cities wealth was Conservative, and to the Rothschilds of the day the cause which offered high interest and good security was the cause of Heaven.

The smouldering fire burst into a flame in Bohemia, a kingdom of the House of Austria, and a member of the Empire; but peopled by hot, impulsive Slaves, jealous of their nationality, as well as of their Protestant faith-Bohemia, whither the spark of Wycliffism had passed along the electric chain of common universities by which medieval Christendom was bound, and where it had kindled first the martyr fire of John Huss and Jerome of Prague, then the fiercer conflagration of the Hussite war. In that

romantic city by the Moldau, with its strange, half Oriental beauty, where Jesuitism now reigns supreme, and St John Nepemuch is the popular divinity, Protestantism and Jesuitism then lay in jealous neighbourhood,-Protestantism supported by the native nobility, from anarchical propensity as well as from religious conviction; Jesuitism patronized and furtively aided by the intrusive Austrian power. From the Emperor Rudolph II, the Protestants had obtained a charter of religious liberties. But Rudolph's successor, Ferdinand II, was the Philip II of Germany in bigotry, though not in cruelty. In his youth, after a pilgrimage to Loretto, he had vowed at the feet of the Pope to restore Catholicism at the hazard of his life. He was a pupil of the Jesuits, almost worshipped priests, was passionately devoted to the ceremonies of his religion, delighting even in the functions of an acolyte, and, as he said, preferred a desert to an empire full of heretics. He had, moreover, before his accession to the throne, come into collision with Protestantism where it was triumphant, and had found in its violence too good an excuse for his bigotry. It was inevitable that as King of Bohemia he should attempt to narrow the Protestant liberties. The hot Czech blood took fire, the fierceness of political turbulence mingled with that of religious zeal, and at a council held at Prague, in the old palace of the Bohemian kings, Martinitz and Slavata, the most hated of Ferdinand's creatures, were thrown out of a window in what was called good Bohemian fashion, and only by a marvellous accident escaped with their lives. The first blow was struck, the signal was given for thirty years of havoc. Insurrection flamed up in Bohemia. At the head of the insurgents, Count Thurn rushed on Vienna. The Emperor was saved only by a miracle, as Jesuitism averred,—as Rationalism says, by the arrival of Dampierre's Imperial horse. He suffered a fright which must have made him more than

ever prefer a desert to an empire full of heretics. By a vote of the States of Bohemia the crown was taken from Ferdinand and offered to Frederic, Elector Palatine. Frederic was married to the bright and fascinating Princess Elizabeth of England, the darling of Protestant hearts; other qualifications for that crown of peril he had none. But in an evil hour he accepted the offer. Soon his unfitness appeared. A foreigner, he could not rein the restive and hardmouthed Czech nobility; a Calvinist and a pupil of the Huguenots, he unwisely let loose Calvinist iconaclasm among a people who clung to their ancient images though they had renounced their ancient faith. Supinely he allowed Austria and the Catholic League to raise their Croats and Walloons with the ready aid, so valuable in that age of unready finance, of Spanish gold. Supinely he saw the storm gather and roll towards him. Supinely he lingered in his palace, while on the White Hill, a name fatal in Protestant annals, his army, filled with his own discouragement, was broken by the combined forces of the Empire, under Bucquoi, and of the Catholic League, under Count Tilly. Still there was hope in resistance: yet Frederic fled. He was in great danger, say his apologists. It was to face a great danger, and show others how to face it, that he had come there. Let a man, before he takes the crown of Bohemia, look well into his own heart. Then followed a scaffold scene like that of Egmont and Horn, but on a larger scale. Ferdinand, it seems, hesitated to shed blood, but his confessor calmed his scruples. Before the City Hall of Prague, and near the Thein Church, bearing the Hussite emblems of the chalice and sword, amidst stern military pomp, the Emperor presiding in the person of his High Commissioner, twenty-four victims of high rank were led forth to death. Just as the executions commenced a bright rainbow spanned the sky. To the victims it seemed an assurance of Heaven's mercy. To the

gloom. By the side of the brave burghers who beat back the Prince of Parma from the cities of Holland, a place must be made in history for the brave burghers who beat back Wallenstein from Stralsund, after he had sworn, in his grand, impious way, that he would take it though it were bound by a chain to Heaven. The eyes of all Protestants were turned, says Richelieu, like those of sailors, towards the North. And from the North a deliverer came. On Midsummer day, 1630, a bright day in the annals of Protestantism, of Germany, and, as Protestants and Germans must believe, of human liberty and progress, Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, landed at Penemiinde, on the Pomeranian coast, and knelt down on the shore to give thanks to God for his safe passage: then showed at once his knowledge of the art of war and of the soldier's heart, by himself taking spade in hand, and commencing the entrenchment of his camp. Gustavus was the grandson of that Gustavus Vasa who had broken at once the bonds of Denmark and of Rome, and had made Sweden independent and Lutheran. He was the son of that Charles Vasa who had defeated the counter-reformation. Devoted from his childhood to the Protestant cause, hardily trained in a country where even the palace was the abode of thrift and self-denial, his mind enlarged by a liberal education, in regard for which, amidst her poverty, as in the general character and habits of her people, his Sweden greatly resembled Scotland; his imagination stimulated by the wild scenery, the dark forests, the starry nights of Scandinavia; gifted by nature both in mind and body; the young king had already shown himself a hero. He had waged grim war with the powers of the icy north; he bore several scars, proofs of a valour only too great for the vast interests which depended on his life; he had been a successful innovator in tactics, or rather a successful restorer of the military science of the Romans. But the best of his military innovations were

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discipline and religion. His discipline redeemed the war from savagery, and made it again, so far as war, and war in that iron age could be, a school of humanity and selfcontrol. In religion he was himself not an ascetic saint: there is one light passage at least in his early life and at Augsburg they show a ruff plucked from his neck by a fair Augsburger at the crisis of a very brisk flirtation. But he was devout, and he inspired his army with his devotion. The traveller is still struck with the 'prayer and hymn which open and close the march of the soldiers of Gustavus. Schools for the soldiers' children were held in his camp. It is true that the besetting sin of the Swedes, and of all dwellers in cold countries, is disclosed by the article in his military code directed against the drunkenness of army chaplains.

Sir Thomas Roe, the most sagacious of the English diplomatists of that age, wrote of Gustavus to James I. :- "The king hath solemnly protested that he will not depose arms till he hath spoken one word for your majesty in Germany (that was his own phrase); and glory will contend with policy in his resolution; for he hath unlimited thoughts, and is the likeliest instrument for God to work by in Europe. We have often observed great alterations to follow great spirits, as if they were fitted for the times. Certainly, ambit fortunam Cæsaris: he thinks the ship cannot sink that carries him, and doth thus oblige prosperity."

Gustavus justified his landing in Germany by a manifesto setting forth hostile acts of the Emperor against him in Poland. No. doubt, there was a technical casus belli. But, morally, the landing of Gustavus was a glorious breach of the principle of non-intervention. He came to save the world. He was not the less a fit instrument for God to work by because it was likely that he would rule the world when he had saved it. "A snow king!" tittered the courtiers of Vienna, "he will soon melt away." He soon began to prove to them, both in war and di