is so much chance in warfare, and such vast events are connected with the acts of a single individual,—the representative, in truth, of the efforts of myriads, and yet to the public and, doubtless, to his own feelings, the aggregate of all, that the proper temperament for generating or receiving superstitious impressions is naturally produced. At the same time it must be allowed that Wallenstein's superstition was exceptional, both in kind and in degree.

As Schiller, then, portrays him, it is only when events have forced decision on him, that he "rises in his native might, that his giant spirit [again to quote Mr. Carlyle's critique] stands unfolded in its strength before us;

Night must it be, ere Friedland's star will beam:

amid difficulties, darkness, and impending ruin, at which the boldest of his followers grow pale, he himself is calm, and first in this awful crisis feels the serenity and conscious strength of his soul return." His indecision is made to partly take its rise in the sensibilities of his heart, as well as in the caution of his judgment: his belief in astrology, which gives force and confirmation to this tendency, is supposed to originate in some soft kindly emotions, and thus adds a new interest to the spirit of the warrior. And though his treason to the Emperor is a crime, yet, "provoked and tempted as he was, we do not greatly blame him; it is forgotten in our admiration of his nobleness, or recollected only as a venial trespass. Schiller has succeeded well with Wallenstein, where it was not easy to succeed. The truth of history has been but little violated; yet we are compelled to feel that Wallenstein, whose actions individually are trifling, unsuccessful, and unlawful, is a strong, sublime, commanding character; we look at him with interest, our concern at his fate is tinged with a shade of kindly pity."+ Whether Mr. Carlyle, at the present time of day, would endorse this sentence, as to the historical fidelity of Schiller's dramatic masterpiece, admits of doubt.

If historically faithful in the main, that elaborate portraiture really be, how unfaithful must we pronounce M. Michelet in his version of Wallenstein as homme diabolique-ruthless, heartless, godless-a ghastly spectre of misrule-a demi-devil of calculating crime-as cold and hard as the nether millstone. Le grand marchand de meurtres, he calls him -"the secret chief of those raging wolves who had never met with so capital a master, that is to say, with one so cruel, or so tolerant towards crime." In one of his appendices the Frenchman deplores the error Schiller committed in placing, "posing," ce spéculateur en face de Gustave Adolphe. He owns Wallenstein to be great in the character of a scourge"but his speculation was of a very simple kind, and the frightful prize held out by him was to attract to his side all the soldiers that on earth do dwell. Gustavus, that real master-mind, too great to defame any man, thought lightly of Wallenstein's military talents."§

* See Coleridge's Literary Remains, vol. i.: Notes on Macbeth.

† Carlyle, Life of Schiller, part iii.

Michelet, Richelieu et la Fronde, pp. 93, 96; cf. pp. 3 sq., 129, 428 sq. § Notes et Eclaircissements: Waldstein.

Schiller, on the other hand, expressly makes the Swedish envoy, Colonel Wrangel, assure the revolted duke,

-Our great King, now in heaven,

Did ever deem most highly of your Grace's
Pre-eminent sense and military genius;
And always the commanding Intellect,

He said, should have command, and be the king.*

Michelet's summary of Wallenstein's strategy is, that he accomplished petty results by a lavish expenditure of enormous means: Il fit de petites choses avec des moyens énormes. According to this historian, Gustavus laughed outright at the duke's theatrical attitude-at his tragi-comic affectation of solitude amid crowds-his sombre silence and mysterious reserve. (We may remark, by the way, that Wallenstein appears, notwithstanding his rugged make, to have been morbidly susceptible to noise and on that account addicted to seclusion. An incidental passage in Mr. Carlyle's latest history will illustrate this peculiarity. "Or Wallenstein's palace [at Prague],-did your Majesty look at that ?+ A thing worth glancing at, on the score of History, and even of Natural History. That rugged son of steel could not endure the least noise in his sleeping-room or even sitting-room,-a difficulty in the soldiering way of life, and had, if I remember, one hundred and thirty houses torn away in Prag, and sentries posted all round in the distance, to secure silence for his much-meditating indignant soul."-But to recur to the royal Swede and his strictures on our duke.) The king called Wallenstein narren-which plain-spoken Germanism, being Frenchified, Michelet takes to be le fat, or perhaps le sot. Schiller is therefore designated a pauvre dramaturge, a poor playwright, who is imbued with reverential terror of the imposing Bohemian." He copies with cittish admiration the old German records of the magnificent habits of this illustrious scoundrel. How his table had its hundred covers-how many carriages he had-that his maître-d'hôtel was of the first quality, &c. Pitiful nothings! But what is worse in Schiller's book, and what falsifies his history at every step of the way, is the deplorable effort he makes to be impartial between good and evil. A reproach, too, that may be cast on more than one German, among others, to our amiable, learned, ingenious Ranke, by whom we have been taught so much."§ Impartiality is not one of M. Michelet's besetting sins. He, at least, takes his side in a dispute without a soupçon of shilly-shallying-and when he has resolved, as he easily can, to paint a man black, there is no fear of his enfeebling the effect by a solicitous interposition of neutral tints.

Ambition is compared by Lord Bacon, in a thoroughly Baconian image, to choler, "which is a humour that maketh men active, earnest, full of alacrity, and stirring, if it be not stopped; but if it be stopped,

* The Death of Wallenstein, Act I. Sc. 5. (Coleridge's translation.) †The subject of the context is Friedrich-Wilhelm's visit to the Kaiser, in 1732.

Carlyle's Hist. of Friedrich II., vol. i. book ix. ch. iv.

Michelet, t. xii. p. 428.

and cannot have its way, it becometh adust, and thereby malign and
venomous." So, ambitious men, the great Essayist proceeds to show, if
they find the way open for their rising, and still get forward, are rather
busy than dangerous; but if they be checked in their desires, they be-
come secretly discontent, and look upon men and matters with an evil
eye, and are best pleased when things go backward ;—“ which is the
worst property in a servant of a prince of state: therefore it is good for
princes, if they use ambitious men, to handle it so, as they be still pro-
gressive, and not retrograde, which, because it cannot be without incon-
venience, it is good not to use such natures at all; for if they rise not
with their service, they will take order to make their service fall with
them."*
Schlegel holds that Wallenstein's guilt lay not so much in the
suspicious schemes of his latter days, whereby his downfal was imme-
diately occasioned, as in his ambition, which brought so much misfortune
on Germany, and greatly contributed to extend the theatre of hostilities.
"By the design he betrayed of acquiring a principality for himself on
the Baltic, he drew the King of Sweden into Germany, who was already
irritated against the Emperor for having rendered assistance to his
brother-in-law Sigismund." "J'ai vu des hommes," says Marmontel's
sage old hero, as a climax of enormity, "qui, pour s'avancer, auroient
jetté au hazard le salut d'une armée et le sort d'un Empire." Of such
audacious souls-here proposed as examples of ambition's ne plus ultra
-was Wallenstein. Step by step he rose, and kept rising, and would
not be stayed at any one point of the ascent, by any mortal influence.
As the jovial sergeant gossips, in the sutler's tent,

And ev'n the Friedlander's self-I've heard-
Our General and all-commanding Lord,
Who now can do what he will at a word,
Had at first but a private squire's degree;
In the goddess of war yet bursting free,
He rear'd the greatness, which now you see,
And, after the Emperor, next is he.

Who knows what more he may mean or get?

for, as this tosspot subaltern shrewdly suggests,

(Denn noch nicht aller Tage Abend ist)
For all-day's evening isn't come yet. §

Or as a more dignified officer more gravely phrases it, in the tragedy which closes Schiller's trilogy,

He paced with rapid step the way of greatness,

Was Count, and Prince, Duke-regent, and Dictator.
And now is all, all this too little for him;

He stretches forth his hands for a king's crown,
And plunges in unfathomable ruin.[]

Many, serious, and strenuously asserted as were the charges against him, which were published by authority after his death, they failed to

* Bacon's Essays: Of Ambition.

+ Schlegel's Modern History, lect. xvii.
Bélisaire, ch. vii.

§ Schiller, Wallensteinslager, VII.

Death of Wallenstein, Act IV. Sc. 3.

convince historians who-as one of the unconvinced moderns puts it— approached the subject with any degree of critical intelligence, that Wallenstein ever entertained any real design of uniting with the enemies of the Emperor, till he was driven in self-defence to seek support against the maltreatment of the court of Vienna. "Whatever judgment men might form of his conduct and character, whether they might think him guilty or innocent, a faithful subject or a mutinous soldier, the dark hypocrisy of the Emperor, his scorn for all the forms of justice, his black trafficking in the blood of his subjects, his ingratitude, his meanness, his baseness, were displayed in every act that preceded, accompanied, or followed the tragedy of Egra." Elsewhere the same writer, and in the same strain, denounces the conduct of the Emperor as "base, pusillanimous, treacherous, and faithless"-and lays stress on our knowledge that he at least, this bespattered Kaiser, did all the things with which he afterwards charged the memory of his victim; that he concealed his designs; that he affected friendship when he meditated murder; that he intrigued with the officers of Wallenstein's army; that he falsified truth, and that he played the hypocrite with such art as could only come from nature-implying an inborn talent in that line of things. This point of view reminds us again of the position of Emperor and Hero in Marmontel's fade fiction: "Le seul crime de ce Héros," soliloquises the Cæsar, "est d'avoir été populaire: c'est par-là qu'il a donné prise aux calomnies de ma Cour, et peut-être à ma jalousie." Mr. Landor does not omit, in his address to Ingratitude, Imperial Austrian in particular, to cite among a plurality of instances the case before us :

When Wallenstein no more enlarged

The lands he rescued, he was charged
With treason.‡

Cardinal Richelieu, his contemporary, in what M. Sainte-Beuve calls an "admirable portrait" of Wallenstein, "that glorieux generalissimo of the Empire, who was assassinated by his master's orders,""-dwells magniloquently on the faithlessness and ingratitude of mankind,-and, after narrating the life-history of this redoubtable commander, and representing him with fidelity "in his habit as he lived," his Eminence observes: "Those blamed him after he was dead, who would have praised him had he lived: we readily accuse those who are not in a condition to defend themselves. When once the tree is fallen, all run at the branches to finish the work of demolition; whether a man's reputation shall be good or bad, depends on the closing stage of his existence; the good and the bad pass on to posterity, and the malice of men secures a readier belief in the bad than in the good."§ M. Sainte-Beuve styles this last passage one "that recals Shakspeare, and that Schiller would have envied"—but when the Cardinal adds to his Wallenstein heroics this rather homely and punpointed phrase, "On connut bientôt après, qu'un mort ne mord point, et que l'affection des hommes ne regarde point ce qui n'est plus,"-his polite critic shrinks back dismayed, and declares that the Cardinal, by

*See chapters vii. and viii. of James's Dark Scenes of History.
Bélisaire, ch. ix.

Last Fruit off an Old Tree, p. 409.

Lettres, &c., du Cardinal de Richelieu, t. i. (Paris, 1858.)

thus prolonging his reflection, spoils it, so far as a thing so originally good can be spoilt.* Richelieu had not a soul above playing on words, especially in the case of proper names. In his portrait of Du Plessis Mornay, he says 'twas a pity that stout anti-Catholic had not been mort-né (Mornay)—another mortally bad witticism, to be sure.

Richelieu's Memoirs inform us that Wallenstein entertained hostile feelings towards France; and as the duke's own letters indicate his decided enmity to Sweden, Colonel Mitchell-whose Life of Wallenstein is based on Prussian Dr. Forster's laborious biography-would fain suppose that he was honestly striving to unite the different powers of Germany, in order to clear the empire of foreign influence and foreign armies; so that a peace might be concluded between the Catholics and Protestants without being first purchased from strangers, at the enormous price which they ultimately exacted for their interference in the war. This is just what Michelet would say that Wallenstein did not desire this supposed antipathy to foreign agency, and this presumed anxiety to reconcile contending religions, are, from the French historian's stand-point, utterly out of the question. There was a period, however, early in his career, when Wallenstein became the soul of the intrigues carried on in the camps and in the little courts of Northern Germany, and it is Menzel's assertion that had not the Catholics, like the Protestants at a previous crisis, been blinded by petty jealousies, Europe would have been moulded by his quick and comprehensive genius into another form. He demanded a thorough reaction, an unconditional restoration of the ancient imperial power, a monarchy as absolute as that of France and Spain." These projects were frustrated by Wallenstein's own party. The Jesuits already viewed him with suspicion, and their aim was to suppress the Reformation, not the princely aristocracy, which they hoped indeed to restore to the Catholic Church. "Richelieu also dreaded the unity of Germany, and offered to invade the empire in order to curb Wallenstein, of whose genius he was apprehensive, by main force." To the Jesuit party, historians of various schools agree in assigning the ruin of Wallenstein. He might baffle them at intervals, but they outdid him in the long run. He might become indispensable to the empire in the hour of dread extremity and threatened collapse; and then, as after the death of Tilly (the Jesuits' dear delight) and during the triumphant progress of Gustavus Adolphus, Wallenstein must be employed at all hazards, and despite all protests from the Society. The intrigues of France, Bavaria, and the Pope, compelled Ferdinand, "notwithstanding the efforts of the Jesuits and of Spain," again to have recourse to Wallenstein, "who, the moment of danger passed, was once more to be thrown aside and sacrificed to the Jesuit party." It is not in mere poetical licence and bombast circumstance that the duke is indulging when he exclaims,

Once already have I

Proved myself worth an army to you-I alone!
Before the Swedish strength your troops had melted;
Beside the Lech sank Tilly your last hope;

*Causeries du Lundi, t. vii.: "Le Cardinal de Richelieu." † Menzel, Hist. of Germany, § ccvi.

+ Ibid. § ccviii.