the day was again going against him, when the remainder of Pappenheim's corps arrived, and the road was once more opened to victory by a charge which cost Pappenheim his own life. At four o'clock the battle was at its last gasp. The carnage had been fearful on both sides, and as fearful was the exhaustion. For six hours al most every man in both armies had borne the terrible excitement of mortal combat with pike and sword; and four times that excitement had been strained by general charges to its highest pitch. The Imperialists held their ground, but confused and shattered; their constancy sustained only by that commanding presence which still moved along their lines, unhurt, though grazed and even marked by the storm of death through which he rode. Just as the sun was setting, the Swedes made the supreme effort which heroism alone can make. Then Wallenstein gave the signal for retreat, welcome to the bravest; and as darkness fell upon the field, the shattered masses of the Imperialists drew off slowly and sullenly into the gloom. Slowly and sullenly they drew off, leaving nothing to the victor except some guns of position; but they had not gone far when they fell into the disorganization of defeat.

Te Deum was sung at Vienna and Madrid, and with good reason. For Vienna and Madrid the death of Gustavus was better than' any victory. For humanity, if the interests of humanity were not those of Vienna and Madrid, it was worse than any defeat. But for Gustavus himself, was it good thus to die glorious and stainless, but before his hour? Triumph and empire, it is said, might have corrupted the soul which up to this time had been so pure and true. It was, perhaps, well for him that he was saved from temptation. A deeper morality replies that what was bad for Gustavus' cause and for his kind, could not be good for Gustavus; and that whether he were to stand or fall in the hour of temptation, he had better have lived his time and done his work. We, with our small philosophy, can make allowance for the greater dangers of the higher sphere; and shall we arrogate to ourselves a larger judgment and ampler sympathies than we allow to God? Yet Gustavus was happy. Among soldiers and statesmen, if there is a greater, there is hardly a purer name. He had won not only honour but love, and the friend and comrade was as much bewailed as the deliverer and the king. In him his Sweden appeared for the first and last time with true glory on the scene of universal history. In him the spirit of the famous house of Vasa rose to the first heroic height. It was soon to mount to madness in Christina and Charles XII.

Not till a year had passed could Sweden bring herself to consign the remains of her Gustavus to the dust. Then came a hero's funeral, with pomp not unmeaning, with trophies not unbecoming the obsequies of a Christian, and for mourners the sorrowing nations. In early youth Gustavus had loved the beautiful Ebba Brahé, daughter of a Swedish nobleman, and she had returned his love. But etiquette and policy interposed, and Gustavus married Eleanor, a princess of Brandenburg, also renowned for beauty

The widowed Queen of Gustavus, though she had loved him with a fondness too great for their perfect happiness, admitted his first love to a partnership in her grief, and sent Ebba with her own portrait the portrait of him who was gone where, if love still is, there is no more rivalry in love.

The death of Gustavus was the death of his great antagonist. Gustavus gone, Wallenstein was no longer indispensable, and he was more formidable than ever. Lutzen had abated nothing either of his pride or power. He went forth again from Prague to resume command in almost imperial pomp. The army was completely in his hands. He negotiated as an independent power, and was carrying into effect a policy of his own, which seems to have been one of peace for the empire with amnesty and toleration, and which certainly crossed the policy of the Jesuits and Spain, now dominant in the Imperial councils. No doubt the great adventurer also intended that his own grandeur should be augmented and secured. Whether his proceedings gave his master just cause for alarm remains a mystery. The word, however, went forth against him, and in Austrian fashion, a friendly correspondence being kept up with him when he had been secretly deposed and his command transferred to another. Finding himself denounced and outlawed, he resolved to throw himself on the Swedes. He had arrived at Eger, a frontier fortress of Bohemia. It was a night apt for crime, dark and stormy, when Gordon, a Scotch Calvinist in the Imperial service, (for Wallenstein's camp welcomed adventurers of all creeds), and commandant of Eger, received the most faithful of Wallenstein's officers, Terzka, Kinsky, Illo and Neumann, at supper in the citadel. The social meal was over, the wine cup was going round; misgiving, if any misgiving there was, had yielded to comradeship and good cheer, when the door opened and death, in the shape of a party of Irish troopers, stalked in. The conspirators sprang

from the side of their victims, and shouting, "Long live the Emperor," ranged themselves with drawn swords against the wall, while the assassins overturned the table and did their work. Wallenstein, as usual, was not at the banquet. He was indeed in no condition for revelry. Gout had shattered his stately form, reduced his bold handwriting to a feeble scrawl, probably shaken his powerful mind, though it could rally itself, as at Lutzen, for a decisive hour; and, perhaps, if his enemies could have waited, the course of nature might have spared them the very high price which they paid for his blood. He had just dismissed his astrologer, Seni, into whose mouth the romance of history does not fail to put prophetic warnings; his valet was carrying away the golden salver on which his night draught had been brought to him, and he was about to lie down, when he was drawn to the window by the noise of Butler's regiment surrounding his quarters, and by the shrieks of the Countesses Terzka and Kinsky, who were wailing for their murdered husbands. A moment afterwards the Irish Captain Devereux burst into the room, followed by his fellow-assassins shouting "Rebels, rebels." Devereux himself, with a halbert in his hand, rushed up to Wallenstein, and cried "Villain, you are to die!" True to his own majesty the great man spread out his arms, received the weapon in his breast, and fell dead without a word. But as thought at such moments is swift, no doubt he saw it all-saw the dark conclave of Italians and Spaniards sitting at Vienna-knew that the murderer before him was the hand and not the head-read at once his own doom and the doom of his grand designs for Germany and Friedland. His body was wrapped in a carpet, carried in Gordon's carriage to the citadel, and there left for a day with those of his murdered friends in the court-yard, then huddled into a hastily constructed coffin, the legs of the corpse being broken to force it in. Different obsequies from those of

Gustavus, but perhaps equally appropriate, at least equally characteristic of the cause which the dead man served.

Did Friedland desire to be more than Friedland, to unite some shadow of command with the substance, to wear some crown of tinsel, as well as the crown of power? We do not know, we know only that his ways were dark, that his ambition was vast, and that he was thwarting the policy of the Jesuits and Spain. Great efforts were made in vain to get up a case against his memory; recourse was had to torture, the use of which always proves that no good evidence is forthcoming; absurd charges were included in the indictment, such as that of having failed to pursue and destroy the Swedish army after Lutzen. The three thousand masses which Ferdinand caused to be sung for Wallenstein's soul, whether they benefited his soul or not have benefited his fame, for they seem like the weak self-betrayal of an uneasy conscience, vainly seeking to stifle infamy and appease the injured shade. Assassination itself condemns all who take part in it or are accomplices in it; and Ferdinand, who rewarded the assassins of Wallenstein, was at least an accomplice after the fact. Vast as Wallenstein's ambition was, even for him age and gout must have begun to close the possibilities of life; and he cannot have been made restless by the pangs of abortive genius, for he had played the grandest part upon the grandest stage. He had done enough, it would seem, to make repose welcome, and his retirement would not have been dull. Often in his letters his mind turns from the camp and council to his own domains, his rising palaces, his farms, his gardens, his schools, his manufactures, the Italian civilization which the student of Padua was trying to create in Bohemian wilds, the little empire in the administration of which he showed that he might have been a good Emperor on a larger scale. Against his Imperial master

he is probably entitled at least to a verdict of not proven, and to the sympathy due to vast services requited by murder. Against accusing humanity his plea is far weaker, or rather he has no plea but one of extenuation. If there is a gloomy majesty about him the fascination of which we cannot help owning, if he was the noblest spirit that served evil, still it was evil that he served. The bandit hordes which he led were the scourges of the defenceless people, and in making war support war he set the evil example which was followed by Napoleon on a greater scale, and perhaps with more guilt, because in a more moral age. If in any measure he fell a martyr to a policy of toleration, his memory may be credited with the sacrifice. His toleration was that of indifference, not that of a Christian ; yet the passages of his letters in which he pleads for milder methods of conversion, and claims for widows an exemption from the extremities of persecution, seem preserved by his better angel to shed a ray of brightness on his lurid name. Of his importance in history there can be no doubt. Take your stand on the battle field of Lutzen. To the North all was rescued by Gustavus, to the South all was held till yesterday by the darker genius of Wallenstein.

Like the mystic bark in the Mort d'Arthur, the ship which carried the remains of Gustavus from the German shore bore away heroism as well as the hero. Gustavus left great captains in Bernard of Weimar, Banner, Horn, Wrangel and Tortensohn; in the last, perhaps, a captain equal to himself. He left in Oxenstiern the greatest statesman and diplomatist of the age. But the guiding light, the grand aim, the ennobling influence were gone.

The Swedes sank almost to the level of the vile element around, and a torture used by the buccaneers to extract confessions of hidden treasure bore the name of the Swedish draught. The last grand figure left

the scene is Wallenstein. Nothing remained but mean ferocity and rapine, coarse filibustering among the soldiers, among the statesmen and diplomatists filibustering a little more refined. All high motives and interests were dead. The din of controversy which at the outset accompanied the firing of the cannon, and proved that the cannon was being fired in a great cause, had long since sunk into silence. Yet for fourteen years after the death of Wallenstein this foullest, aimless drama of horror and agony dragged on. Every part of Germany was repeatedly laid under heavy war contributions, and swept through by pillage, murder, rape and arson. For thirty years all countries, even those of the Cossack and the Stradiot, sent their worst sons to the scene of butchery and plunder. It may be doubted whether such desolation ever fell upon any civilized and cultivated country. When the war began Germany was rich and prosperous, full of smiling villages, of goodly cities, of flourishing universities, of active industry, of invention and discovery, of literature and learning, of happiness, of progress, of national energy and hope. At its close she was a material and moral wilderness. In a district, selected as a fair average specimen of the effects of the war, it is found that of the inhabitants three-fourths, of the cattle four-fifths, perished. thirty years the husbandman never sowed with any confidence that he should reap; the seed-corn was no doubt often consumed by the reckless troopers or the starving peasantry; and if foreign countries had been able to supply food there were no railroads to bring it. The villages through whole provinces were burnt or pulled down to supply materials for the huts of the soldiery; the people hid themselves in dens and caves of the earth; took to the woods and mountains, where many of them remained swelling the multitude of brigands. When they could they wreaked upon the lansquenets a vengeance as dreadful as what they had

For

suffered, and were thus degraded to the same level of ferocity. Moral life was broken up. The Germany of Luther with its order and piety and domestic virtue, with its old ways and customs, even with its fashions of dress and furniture, perished almost as though it had been swallowed by an earthquake. The nation would hardly have survived had it not been for the desperate tenacity with which the peasant clung to his own soil, and the efforts of the pastors, men of contracted views, of dogmatic habits of mind, and of a somewhat narrow and sour morality, but staunch and faithful in the hour of need, who continued to preach and pray amidst blackened ruins to the miserable remnants of their flocks, and sustained something of moral order and of social life.

Hence in the succeeding centuries, the political nullity of the German nation, the absence of any strong popular element to make head against the petty despotism of the princes, and launch Germany in the career of progress. Hence the backwardness and torpor of the Teutonic race in its original seat, while elsewhere it led the world. Hence, while England was producing Chathams and Burkes, Germany was producing the great musical composers. Hence when the movement came it was rather intellectual than political, rather a movement of the universities than of the nation.

At last, nothing being left for the armies. to devour, the masters of the armies began to think of peace. The diplomatists went to work, and in true diplomatic fashion. Two years they spent in formalities and haggling, while Germany was swarming with disbanded lansquenets. It was then that old Oxenstiern said to his son, who had modestly declined an ambassadorship on the ground of inexperience: "Thou knowest not, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed." The object of all the parties to the negotiations was acquisition of territory at the expense of their neighbours;