Who now reads the details of our last great war?  Who has not almost forgotten the names of its ordinary generals?  How sickening the description of the Crusades!  The mind cannot dwell on the conflagrations, the massacres, the starvations, the desolations, of an invaded country.  Few even read a description of the famous battles of the world, which decided the fate of nations.  When battles and marches are actually taking place, and all is uncertainty, then there is a vivid curiosity to learn immediate results; but when wars are ended, we forget the intense excitements which we may have felt when they were taking place.  We gaze with eager interest on a game of football, but when it is ended we care but little for the victors.  It is only when the remote consequences of great wars are traced by philosophical historians, revealing the ways of Providence, retribution, and eternal justice, that interest is enkindled.  No book to me is more dreary and uninteresting than the campaigns of Frederic II., though painted by the hand of one of the greatest masters of modern times.  Even interest in the details of the battles of Napoleon is absorbed in the interest we feel in the man,—­how he was driven hither and thither by the Providence he ignored, and made to point a moral to an immortal tale.  All we care about the histories of wars is the general results, and the principles to be deduced as they bear on the cause of civilization.

It was fortunate for the fame and the cause of Gustavus that at the very outset of his career, when he landed in Pomerania, with his small army of twenty thousand men, the Emperor had been prevailed upon by a pressure he could not resist, and the intrigues of all the German princes, to dispense with the services of Wallenstein.  Spain, France, Bavaria,—­the whole Electoral College, Catholic as well as Protestant,—­clamored for the discharge of the most unscrupulous general of modern times.  He was detested and feared by everybody.  Humanity shed tears over his exactions and cruelties, while general fears were aroused that his influence was dangerous to the public peace.  Most people supposed that the war was virtually ended, and that he was therefore no longer needed.

Loath was Ferdinand to part with the man to whom he was indebted for the establishment of his throne; and it seems he was also personally attached to him.  Long did he resist expostulations and threats.  He felt as poor Ganganelli felt when called upon by the Bourbon courts of Europe to annul the charter of the Jesuits.  Wallenstein would probably have been retained by Ferdinand, had this been possible; but the Emperor was forced to yield to overwhelming importunities.  So the dismissal of the general was decreed at the diet of Worms, and a messenger of the Emperor delivered to the haughty victor the decree of his sovereign.