falls under the guardianship of a rich Catholic uncle, delighted to make a convert of so promising a relative. He travels, no one exactly knows how, nor where; becomes familiar with many parts of Europe; and, like Michael Scot, "learns the art that none may name,' at Padua, under a professor of astrology. At five-and-twenty, he makes, like Macaulay's Marlborough, a prudential investment of his personal charms, but in a more legitimate way; marrying a rich widow of twice his age, who becomes desperately jealous, nearly kills him with a love-potion, dies forthwith, and leaves him her fine estates in Moravia. The uncle immediately follows her, and bequeaths him seven first-class lordships in Bohemia. At thirty, the adventurer is the richest subject of the Kaiser; yet not so rich as to account at all for his subsequent gigantic expenditure. He marries another fortune, and a court lady of high influence into the bargain. In the death-struggle of his native Bohemia he takes no part; but, immediately after the battle of the White Mountain, he comes forward with seven million florins-nearly a million sterling -to buy up from the Court of Vienna the confiscated lands of his countrymen and relations. "His extraordinary command of money," says his English admirer, Colonel Mitchell, "still remains an enigma in his history." But the land, it is added, was worth five times

the money. He is now a prince, and, unlike other princes of that day, a man of ready millions into the bargain. He raises forty thousand men at his own expense; gives away fortunes; builds castles, palaces, towns; lords it over North Germany, from the Mayn to the Baltic; continues his vast system of landed investments, taking care, however, to set off his "military expenses against the purchase-money, and thus reducing the actual cash, received by his imperial vendor, to a fraction. His property is now estimated at thirty millions of florins, or four millions sterling-a sum which must be trebled or quadrupled to suit modern calcuNo. 41.-VOL. VII.

lations. He is the first man in Europe for wealth and prestige, for the power of ruling mankind, and overawing them by the exhibition of grandeur and sternness; not to omit those qualities so dear to the German heart, his glorious contempt for Jesuits, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, and Welschen of every colour, and his solemn pretensions to supernatural knowledge. Yet all this time, his exploits, in a military sense, were as nothing. He never won a pitched battle, properly so called, in his life.1 His campaign on the Baltic, announced with such flourishes of trumpet throughout Catholic Europe, proved a wretched failure. He kept his armies togetherit cannot be said, kept them in ordermerely by the assiduous use of the two coarsest stimulants: the terror of sanguinary discipline, the attraction of unlimited plunder. For the execution of his purposes he shrank from no cruelty whatever and Wallenstein, who, in good sooth, was quite free from religious zeal, and cared no more for the Pope than for Luther, left among his contemporaries a name as deeply stained by savage excesses as that of the fanatic Tilly himself " unmerciful "in his executions, inexorable in his "commands, incessantly thirsting for

money:" "odium et nausea generis "homini," so he is designated by his Court enemies. These enemies, and the cry of oppressed provinces, prevail against him. In 1631, he is superseded from his command, and submits to his fall with that curious composure sometimes met with in overbearing men, when fairly mastered; for he was "timid," as our sharp Italian described him, "towards those who show "their teeth;" and that philosophy of resignation, which his biographers term magnanimous, may, if read by the light of his subsequent history, be interpreted as a kind of moral collapse. "You may read it yourselves in the stars," he said to the astonished 1 "Viel Kriegsmacht hat er zusammengc

bracht,

Doch nie geliefert recht eine Schlacht," says one of his jingling epitaphs.

A A

envoys who brought him the news of his dismissal, and who expected a violent scene, "that the Genius of the "Elector of Bavaria1 dominates just now

over that of the Emperor." And he retired without a murmur into private life-but that of a Diocletian. Called once more forth in the disastrous position of Austria after the battle of Breitenfeld, he rallies at once round him all the Catholic elements of the Empire -raises a hundred thousand men, contrives somehow to pay them, and takes the field against Gustavus; but, when there, the marvellous adventurer subsides into a general of very ordinary quality. His most distinguished achievement consisted in judiciously declining to fight the Swede at Nuremberg, with seventy thousand against fifty thousand, and preferring a war of intrenchments—a commendable policy, doubtless, but which ended only in the decimation of both armies, and in his own crowning defeat at Lützen. His tactics in that battle have been described, and their consequences. But slowly and, as it were, reluctantly, did Fortune abandon her strange favourite. The death of Gustavus gave him more than he lost by defeat. He became again, and more than ever, sole master of his own side in Germany; but he lost his vantage in the vain endeavour to become what the stars could not make him-arbiter between the two sides, and reconciler of parties fighting for convictions which he could scarcely comprehend. And now the want of real stamina, of which I have spoken as the negative basis of his character, becomes painfully apparent. Whatever doubts may have formerly pre

1 "Ihr Herren, aus den Astris könnt ihr es selbst sehen, dass des Kurfürsten von Baiern spiritus dominirt über des Kaisers seinen." Such was the wonderful jargon which Wallenstein, as well as other distinguished Germans, then wrote, and, as it seems, spoke. Here is another specimen, from a report which he made to the Emperor of an action against Gustavus :-"Der König hat auch damit sein Volk über die Massen decoragirt, dass er sie so hazardosamente angeführt, dass sie in vorfallenden occasionen ihm desto weniger trauen werden, und ob Ew. Mag. Volk valor und courage zuvor überflüssig hat, so hat doch diese occasion sie mehr assicurirt.”

vailed, recent discoveries seem to place it beyond a doubt, first, that his schemes included treason to his sovereign and ingratitude to his benefactor; next, that they were both conceived and carried out with an imbecility of purpose which takes all grandeur from his crime. Then-when detected and exposed, when chief after chief deserted him, and the net of destruction was drawing closer and closer round him—his presence of mind and fertility of resource seem to have failed him altogether. He opposed to his destiny nothing but a kind of proud but dull self-confidence, which partook less of dignity than of the fatuity of despair, and exposed his bosom to the halberts of his military executioners only when absolutely at his wits' end to finish the drama by any other catastrophe.

Such was the Wallenstein of history, according to the best of my judgment. How strangely different from the Wallenstein of poetry! And yet while the historical "Duke of Friedland" is only a vague remembrance in men's minds, except those of a few painful antiquaries, the hero of fiction has become a reality, as far as the intimate sympathy of thousands of readers can make him so. The subject is a threadbare one now; yet it is scarcely possible to dismiss him from our thoughts without letting them dwell a while on that incomparable work of art, the Wallenstein of the drama, the central figure of Schiller's magnificent trilogy. Not that he is a character of the highest dramatic order, properly so called. He is not life-like, as is a hero of Shakspeare-one whom we seem to have known, and could recognise in the street; there is something vague about him. Perhaps the sharpness of outline has been a little rubbed off by elaborate execution. He is less an individual man than an embodiment of a thousand thoughts, instincts, emotions. But then-and that is the secret of his triumph-these thoughts and emotions are our own. Different as our sphere of destiny may be from Wallenstein's, the texture of life, whether the fabric be small or great, has its warp and woof of the same hopes, fears, meditations, dis

appointments; and Wallenstein has a word suited for every mood of him who is struggling, to attain success in life, or struggling to keep his position there. As Hazlitt said with such truth of Hamlet, it is we who are Wallenstein. And it is in this point of view that the thread of superstition, which Schiller took from his historical authorities, is so wonderfully interwoven in the poet's design. That superstition seems almost an anomalous trait, in a spirit so refined and so cultivated as the dramatic Wallenstein's: it has no overpowering influence; he can throw it at times altogether aside: but it is a pervading agency, mixing with all others, and making him, not inferior -as in the hand of a less skilful artist he would have become-but superior to his fellows, men trained only in this world's ordinary cunning. Now, for us, or most of us, in this waning nineteenth century -for those, at least, who cannot get up any interest in the material communications with the invisible world conveyed by table-turning and spirit-rapping, cold hands under green baize, and ghosts playing accordions-such vague and shadowy impulses as those which haunt the mind of Schiller's hero, rather than influence his firm judgment, constitute the last influences whereby the "anarch old" Superstition still maintains a relic of her dominion. Who is there among us whose heart has not seemed to move in unison with his, when he exclaims that

"There are moments in the life of man When he is nearer to the world's great Spirit Than is his wont, and may at pleasure ask One question of his fate. 'Twas such a mo

ment

When I, upon the eve of Lützen fight,
Leaning against a tree and full of thoughts,
Gazed forth upon the plain;"

Or when, in the ominous darkness of the night of his murder, he longs for one glimpse of Jupiter

"Methinks,
Could I but see him, all were well with me.
He is the star of my nativity,
And often marvellously hath his aspect
Shot strength into my heart."

And so farewell to Wallenstein and to Gustavus-characters over which the

:

imagination lingers, though one was assuredly both worse and lower than his reputation the other so far elevated by fate and his high purpose above the ordinary sons of men that he loses something of mere human interest. Such as they were, they left no successor behind them. Except the short-lived hero, Bernard of Saxe Weimar, no subsequent personage of that war has made any appreciable mark in history. Uncontrolled by master spirits, the contest lingered on, bloodier and more indecisive, till, out of the two parties, the one bent on subjugation, the other on independence, a mere confused and mangled residue remained, with scarcely voice. enough left to expend in feeble groanings for peace at any price. Famine, sword, and pestilence had uprooted a whole generation. Equal horrors may have occurred in barbarous countries, but never, assuredly, in a civilized and Christian community like that of Germany, where numberless active pens were engaged in chronicling them. Its population, say some authorities, shrank from sixteen or eighteen millions to four millions. Whether this be accurate or no, one curious evidence of the extent of depopulation is to be found in its forest history. The country had thriven so greatly in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, that its vast sylvan riches were beginning to show symptoms of exhaustion. In North Germany numerous edicts were issued before A.D. 1600 for the preservation of the woods. It is recorded of a certain Duke Augustus of Saxony, that, on his walks, he always carried a hollow brass rod filled with acorns, to drop one by one into the ground. There are three things, Melanchthon used to say, which will fail before the end of the world comes: good friends, good money, and firewood. The Thirty Years' War effectually adjourned these complaints to another age. The forest covered again whole tracts which had been under cultivation. What with the diminution of people, and what with the increase of wood, no need of the old kind seems to have been again felt until the middle of the eighteenth

century; and it is said that the forests had then become so overgrown, that the tempestuous seasons which prevailed 1780-1790, destroyed many square miles of them. Germany went back in cultivation, and in political spirit and independence, even more than in mere numbers; it required a Frederic the Great to

raise her again after a hundred years, and that but partially; and even the Germany of the nineteenth century, in which political lags so far behind every other class of thought, bears the impress of that long reign of darkness and terror which broke down the medieval spirit of self-government.

66

was confirmed in this view of the case beyond all doubt, when she heard her father, as the weeks passed, repeatedly alluding to Vincenzo's expected visit during the vacation as a settled matter. Well-the consciousness of all this, added to newly-awakened feelings in her own bosom for her old playmate, gave to her reception of him, when he did come, a tinge of reserve and embarrassment which made it quite a different affair from what it had been up to this day. The alteration in her manner could not fail to react on the young lover, even had he not had other causes to make him look and feel embarrassed on his side : the chief among these causes being his certainty that she was in possession of his secret through Barnaby-the old fellow's evasion of any promise of secrecy, when Vincenzo had tried to extract one from him, too clearly imply

ing a predetermination to use his own discretion, or rather indiscretion, as to telling or not telling.

Nor was this shadow, which had fallen upon them, confined to their first meeting it resisted the action of time, and hung more or less over their subsequent intercourse. Now and then the one or the other would fall into old ways, use the once familiar intonations, talk on once familiar topics; but, then, this always occurred in the presence of a third person, never when alonethough, indeed, that they seldom were. Not that they positively avoided each other's company, only they did not seek to be tête-à-tête as of yore; and, when a chance rencontre threw them together, it was curious to observe how studiously one or the other, or both, tried to put between them somebody else—either tottering Don Natale, or Barnaby, or Giuseppe, or (at a later period, when there were several visitors staying in the palace) any of the guests. Since we have named Barnaby, let us mention that, from the moment of Vincenzo's arrival, he had magnanimously resumed communication with his master on the old footing. Even Rose's father, who was anything but a keen observer, could not help at last noticing this state of constraint between the two young people; and, much as he wished to set them at their ease, he still shrank from pronouncing the word which alone could do so. Had he, then, once more changed

his intentions? Yes, and no. The Signor Avvocato still faithfully adhered to the engagement he had taken with himself to give his daughter to Vincenzo ; at the same time there is no denying the fact, that all the ardour in the matter he had brought back with him from Turin had vanished. Two full months of reflection had given him time to measure the void which Rose's absence would leave in his home-surely it was a sacrifice for which there need be no hurry! She was so young-but just nineteen-and Vincenzo himself was hardly yet of the age at which young men marry! He should have her-in a year or so when his bright prospects began to be realized! And so, from one thing to another, the good gentleman had ended by consigning the evil to that distant future sine die so dear to spirits irresolute.

Having once established himself comfortably in this passive position, Rose's father naturally dreaded nothing so much as shifting it for one where there might be something to do; hence his unwillingness to break the ice, at the risk of making a question, which he hoped he had set at rest for ever so long, one open to discussion. But, being as soft-hearted as he was incapable of decision-that is, wishing to mend the situation without renouncing the status quo-he hit upon a middle course, which only made matters worse. He took to giving little hints, which were meant to be encouraging, but which proved only the source of new perplexity to the parties concerned. For how could Rose, a bashful girl just awaking to love, or Vincenzo, discreet as we know him to be, and bound moreover by a solemn promise-how could they be expected to take advantage of such vague insinuations?

Luckily, the acute period of the trial to both the young people was short, extending scarcely over the first three weeks of Vincenzo's stay at the palace, while there were as yet no strangers there, or only a stray one or two.

The end of

July brought an influx of guests, which went on without any solution of continuity to the end of the season. Rose's

time was in consequence much occupied, Vincenzo's society much in demand, and there were no opportunities for têtes-dtêtes.

The Signor Avvocato was repaying, by this hospitality, the many debts of kindness which his elevation to the knighthood of San Maurice and Lazare had entailed upon him. Foremost on the list of his invitations stood his relations and old friends in Turin, including his new one, Signor Onofrio-who, however, had declined going to Rumelli on the plea of business; then his friends of Ibella, comprising most of the functionaries there, the Intendente at their head-all of whom had called to congratulate him on his new honours; and after them, the mayor of this place, and the parson of that, who had performed the same civility, and so on. Of course, this mighty array of guests were not asked in a lump, but in driblets of six or seven at a time; to which if we add chance visitors, we arrive at an average of no less than ten persons enjoying at one time the hospitality of the palace; and a cordial, unceremonious, plentiful hospitality it was, worthy of a true knight of old. It rarely happened but that the company should be more than doubled on Sundays by arrivals from Ibella and Rumelli, Don Natale for certain among these last. We do not see young Del Palmetto figuring in any of these gatherings, for the very peremptory reason that he had long ago left the castle in high dudgeon: in fact, he had gone away immediately after he had been given to understand that Miss Rose (to use Barnaby's metaphor) "was no bread for his teeth." And so the villeggiatura went on happily through the usual months, until the time came for Vincenzo and the few visitors who had lingered to the last also to take their departure. After breakfast of the morning previous to Vincenzo's departure, the Signor Avvocato had a long, confidential talk with his godson, chiefly about the probable epoch of his being employed, the nature of the employment, and its locality. On these two last points, Vincenzo could throw no