his ability to enrich his soldiers.  Possessing a fine military genius, unbounded means, and unscrupulous rapacity, and assisted by such generals as Tilly, Pappenheim, and Piccolomini, seconded by Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria, he soon reduced his enemies to despair.  The King of Denmark was unequal to the contest, and sued for peace.  The Elector Frederic again became a fugitive, the Duke of Brunswick was killed, and the intrepid Mansfeld died.  The Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg, the natural defenders of Protestantism and the leading princes of the league, were awed into an abject neutrality.  The old protectors of Lutheranism were timid and despairing.  The monarchs of Europe trembled.  Germany lay prostrate and bleeding.  Christendom stood aghast at the greatness of the calamities which afflicted Germany and threatened neighboring nations.

But the Emperor at Vienna was overjoyed, and swelled with arrogance and triumph.  He divided among the members of his imperial house the rich benefices of the Church, and bestowed upon his victorious general the revenues of provinces.  He now resolved to pursue the King of Denmark into his remotest territories, to dethrone the King of Sweden, to give away the crown of Poland, to aid the Spaniards in the recovery of the United Provinces, to exterminate the Protestant religion, to subvert the liberties of the German nations, and reign as a terrible incarnation of imperial tyranny.  He would even revive the dreams of Charlemagne and Charles V., and make Vienna the centre of that power which once emanated from Borne.  He would ally himself more strongly with the Pope, and extend the double tyranny of priests and kings over the whole continent of Europe.  Fines, imprisonments, tortures, banishments, and executions were now added to the desolations which one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers inflicted on villages and cities that had been for generations increasing in wealth and prosperity.

In that dark hour of calamity and fears, Providence raised up a greater hero than Wallenstein, a noble protector and intrepid deliverer, even Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden; and the third act of the political tragedy opens with his brilliant career.

Carlyle has somewhere said:  “Is not every genius an impossibility until he appear?” This is singularly true of Gustavus Adolphus.  It was the last thing for contemporaries to conjecture that the deliverer of Germany, and the great hero of the Thirty Years’ War, would have arisen in the ice-bound regions of northern Europe.  No great character had arisen in Sweden of exalted fame, neither king nor poet, nor philosopher, nor even singer.  The little kingdom, to all appearance, was rich only in mines of iron and hills of snow.  It was not till the middle of the sixteenth century that Sweden was even delivered from base dependence on Denmark.

But Gustavus before he was thirty-five years of age had made his countrymen a nation of soldiers; had freed his kingdom from Danish, Russian, and Polish enemies; had made great improvements in the art of war, having introduced a new system of tactics never materially improved except by Frederic II.; had reduced strategy to a science; had raised the importance of the infantry, had increased the strictness of military discipline, had trained up a band of able generals, and inspired his soldiers with unbounded enthusiasm.