ment and then proceeded :-" One is a letter from the defendant acknowledging the receipt of $150-the other appears to be a bond of defeasance by Rogers, with the usual covenants to recovery; it bears date the day of 1837, which, I think, is the same date as the deed. It will, of course, be necessary to prove this, Mr. Paul. It is witnessed by Hart, the witness to the deed since dead I understand, and”

OPPOSING COUNSEL-" Permit me to see the instrument, my Lord. This is quite new to us, we will submit it to our client, and crave your Lordship's indulgence for a few moments."

But their client was not at hand, no one had noticed Mr. Rogers' departure; but he had quietly withdrawn at the first mention of the bond.

The opposing counsel looked very much crest-fallen, and, addressing the Court, remarked :- "I trust the Court is satisfied that this is the first knowledge we have had of the existence of any such bond. I shall have to leave my learned friend to prove it in the usual way, although I am satisfied, on looking at it, that the signature is Mr. Ro

gers', but I can make no admissions, having concluded with the learned gentleman who is with me to withdraw entirely from the case."

THE COURT "You must judge yourself of your proper course. I can only say that the defendant's conduct is most extraordinary, and I shall consider the propriety of proceedings before another tribunal.”

But I have no patience to write the dry details that had still to be gone through before the case was completely closed. Every one present understood enough of the proceedings to know that Jessie had virtually won her cause; and an audible buzz of congratulation arose in the Court-room, which no attempts were made to suppress. Can my readers doubt that Edgar also won his suit. I have only to add that Rogers, who had evidently speculated on the chances of the bond being lost, or its existence being unknown to the present claimant, she being but a child at the time of her father's death, did not appear at his usual haunts after the trial, and the brightly painted white house on the Bay shore soon after passed into other hands.

THE

HE Thirty Years' War is an old story, but its interest has been recently revived. The conflict, between Austria and German Independence commenced in the struggle of the Protestant Princes against Charles V., and, continued on these battlefields, was renewed and decided at Sadowa. At Sadowa Germany was fighting for unity as well as for independence. But in the Thirty Years' War it was Austria that with her Croats, the Jesuits who inspired her councils, and her Spanish allies, sought to impose a unity of death, against which Protestant Germany struggled, preserving herself for a unity of life which, opened by the victories of Frederick the Great, and, more nobly promoted by the great uprising of the nation against the tyranny of Napoleon, was finally accomplished at Sadowa, and ratified against French jealousy at Sedan. Costly has been the achievement; lavish has been the expenditure of German blood, severe the sufferings of the German people. It is the lot of all who aspire high: no man or nation ever was dandled into greatness.

The Thirty Years' War was a real worldcontest. Austria and Spain drew after them all the powers of reaction: all the powers of liberty and progress were arrayed on the other side. The half-barbarous powers that lay between civilized Europe and Turkey mingled in the conflict: Turkey herself was drawn diplomatically into the vortex. the mines of Mexico and Peru the Indian toiled to furnish both the Austrian and Spanish hosts. The Treaty of Westphalia,

In

which concluded the struggle, long remained the public law of Europe.

Half religious, half political, in its character, this war stands midway between the religious wars of the sixteenth century and the political wars of the eighteenth. France took the political view; and, while she crushed her own Huguenots at home, supported the German Protestants against the House of Austria. Even the Pope, Urban VIII., more politician than churchman, more careful of Peter's patrimony than of Peter's creed, went with France to the Protestant side. With the princes, as usual, political motives were the strongest, with the people religious motives. The politics were to a sad extent those of Machiavelli and the Jesuit; but above the meaner characters who crowd the scene rise at least two grand forms.

In a military point of view, the Thirty Years' War will bear no comparison with that which has just run its marvellous course. The armies were small, seldom exceeding thirty thousand. Tilly thought forty thousand the largest number which a general could handle, while Von Moltke has handled half a million. There was no regular commissariat, there were no railroads, there were no good roads, there were no accurate maps, there was no trained staff. The general had to be everything and to do everything himself. The financial resources of the powers were small: their regular revenues soon failed; and they had to fly for loans to great banking houses, such as that of the Fuggers at Augsburgh, so that the money power be

But if the war was weak, not so were the 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 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