ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
And give advice. Of that, although always a spendthrift
Casual outbursts of eternal friendship
Changed his positions and contradicted himself day by day
Conciliation when war of extermination was intended
Considered it his special mission in the world to mediate
Denoungced as an obstacle to peace
France was mourning Henry and waiting for Richelieu
Hardly a sound Protestant policy anywhere but in Holland
History has not too many really important and emblematic men
I hope and I fear
King who thought it furious madness to resist the enemy
Mockery of negotiation in which nothing could be negotiated
More apprehension of fraud than of force
Opening an abyss between government and people
Successful in this step, he is ready for greater ones
That he tries to lay the fault on us is pure malice
The magnitude of this wonderful sovereign's littleness
This wonderful sovereign's littleness oppresses the imagination
Wise and honest a man, although he be somewhat longsome
Yesterday is the preceptor of To-morrow
CHAPTER XIII. 1617
Ferdinand of Gratz crowned King of Bohemia—His Enmity to
Protestants—Slawata and Martinitz thrown from the Windows of the
Hradschin—Real Beginning of the Thirty Years' War—The Elector-
Palatine's Intrigues in Opposition to the House of Austria—He
supports the Duke of Savoy—The Emperor Matthias visits Dresden—
Jubilee for the Hundredth Anniversary of the Reformation.
When the forlorn emperor Rudolph had signed the permission for his brother Matthias to take the last crown but one from his head, he bit the pen in a paroxysm of helpless rage. Then rushing to the window of his apartment, he looked down on one of the most stately prospects that the palaces of the earth can offer. From the long monotonous architectural lines of the Hradschin, imposing from its massiveness and its imperial situation, and with the dome and minarets of the cathedral clustering behind them, the eye swept across the fertile valley, through which the rapid, yellow Moldau courses, to the opposite line of cliffs crested with the half imaginary fortress-palaces of the Wyscherad. There, in the mythical legendary past of Bohemia had dwelt the shadowy Libuscha, daughter of Krok, wife of King Premysl, foundress of Prague, who, when wearied of her lovers, was accustomed to toss them from those heights into the river. Between these picturesque precipices lay the two Pragues, twin-born and quarrelsome, fighting each other for centuries, and growing up side by side into a double, bellicose, stormy, and most splendid city, bristling with steeples and spires, and united by the ancient many-statued bridge with its blackened mediaeval entrance towers.
But it was not to enjoy the prospect that the aged, discrowned, solitary emperor, almost as dim a figure among sovereigns as the mystic Libuscha herself, was gazing from the window upon the imperial city.
"Ungrateful Prague," he cried, "through me thou hast become thus magnificent, and now thou hast turned upon and driven away thy benefactor. May the vengeance of God descend upon thee; may my curse come upon thee and upon all Bohemia."
History has failed to record the special benefits of the Emperor through which the city had derived its magnificence and deserved this malediction. But surely if ever an old man's curse was destined to be literally fulfilled, it seemed to be this solemn imprecation of Rudolph. Meantime the coronation of Matthias had gone on with pomp and popular gratulations, while Rudolph had withdrawn into his apartments to pass the little that was left to him of life in solitude and in a state of hopeless pique with Matthias, with the rest of his brethren, with all the world.
And now that five years had passed since his death, Matthias, who had usurped so much power prematurely, found himself almost in the same condition as that to which he had reduced Rudolph.
Ferdinand of Styria, his cousin, trod closely upon his heels. He was the presumptive successor to all his crowns, had not approved of the movements of Matthias in the lifetime of his brother, and hated the Vienna Protestant baker's son, Cardinal Clesel, by whom all those movements had been directed. Professor Taubmann, of Wittenberg, ponderously quibbling on the name of that prelate, had said that he was of "one hundred and fifty ass power." Whether that was a fair measure of his capacity may be doubted, but it certainly was not destined to be sufficient to elude the vengeance of Ferdinand, and Ferdinand would soon have him in his power.