370 Mr. A. W. Ward [March 8, 



to those in sympathy with them in the Austrian home duchies, by 

 means of a raid upon Vienna, having come to nothing, an offensive 

 shrinks back into a defensive war, and the Bohemian crown becomes 

 the prize for which militant Calvinism contends with aggressive Catho- 

 licism in the persons of the Elector of Palatine, Frederick V., the 

 representative agent of the great plan against Habsburg, and the 

 Emperor Ferdinand II., the pupil of the Jesuits. That question 

 having been settled on the White Hill, and a peace patched up with 

 the Transylvanian ally of the Bohemian revolt, the Winter King's 

 own patrimony, a land of fruits and wine like no other in the Empire, 

 but destined to suffer more terribly than almost any of them from 

 the scourge of this war, lies, like the gladiator's expectant victim, 

 panting in the arena. After a medley, in which even Spaniards and 

 Englishmen have met, though on dry land, as natural foes, the chief 

 captains of the soldiery on both sides, Mansfeld and his fellows, and 

 Wallenstein, already asserting himself as the master of mercenary 

 war, shift the main theatre of the struggle to the north-west. It is 

 then that the inflated ambition of Christian lY. of Denmark, lack- 

 ing alike in material strength and in intellectual grasp, impels him 

 to essay the first foreign intervention of importance on behalf of 

 the liberties of the Protestant estates endangered by the reaction 

 with the aid of League and Emperor ; and its failure, after the whole 

 of Jutland has been flooded by Imperial troops, gives their victorious 

 master his great opportunity. But the twofold scheme of restoring 

 to the Church of Rome her former landed wealth by means of the 

 Edict of Restitution, and permanently extending the power of the 

 Emperor by sea as well as by land to tiie shores of Baltic and North 

 Sea, breaks down, in part or altogether ; and, after daring Heaven to 

 withstand the advance of the Imperial arms, Wallenstein, the new 

 Duke of Mecklenburg, has, in deference to the jealousy of the 

 princes of the League, to lay down his military command. 



Then there appears on the scene, at last, the great soldier-states- 

 man, who entered into the war with the definite purpose — this also 

 twofold — of safeguarding the security and power of his own Scandi- 

 navian kingdom, and of rescuing German Protestantism, of which 

 it is futile to suppose self-interest only to have prompted him to be- 

 come the champion, in the process. But note how, even in his 

 case, a few months of brilliant though not unbroken success, induce 

 this great strategist and far-sighted politician to change his design 

 into something widely different. So, the head of the whole corpus 

 evangelicorum now means to become master of the whole of Germany, 

 under whatever form may prove most convenient. The purpose to 

 which Gustavus Adolphus, after his victorious but carefully planned 

 march from Oder to Maine, now addressed himself, he seemed likely 

 to accomplish ; but, he no more, it must at once become a phantasm. 

 He falls at Liitzen, and by that single catastrophe the whole condi- 

 tions of the struggle are fundamentally changed. And with tliem 



