The most urgent want was that of a general; and the only one from whom he could hope for the revival of his former splendor had been removed from his command by an envious cabal.  So low had the Emperor now fallen that he was forced to make the most humiliating proposals to his injured subject and servant, and meanly to press upon the imperious Duke of Friedland the acceptance of the powers which no less meanly had been taken from him.  A new spirit began from this moment to animate the expiring body of Austria; and a sudden change in the aspect of affairs bespoke the firm hand which guided them.  To the absolute King of Sweden, a general equally absolute was now opposed; and one victorious hero was confronted with another.  Both armies were again to engage in the doubtful struggle; and the prize of victory, already almost secured in the hands of Gustavus Adolphus, was to be the object of another and a severer trial.  The storm of war gathered around Nuremberg; before its walls the hostile armies encamped, gazing on each other with dread and respect, longing for, and yet shrinking from, the moment that was to close them together in the shock of battle.  The eyes of Europe turned to the scene in curiosity and alarm, while Nuremberg, in dismay, expected soon to lend its name to a more decisive battle than that of Leipzig.  Suddenly the clouds broke, and the storm rolled away from Franconia, to burst upon the plains of Saxony.  Near Luetzen fell the thunder that had menaced Nuremberg; the victory, half lost, was purchased by the death of the king.  Fortune, which had never forsaken him in his lifetime, favored the King of Sweden even in his death, with the rare privilege of falling in the fulness of his glory and an untarnished fame.  By a timely death, his protecting genius rescued him from the inevitable fate of man—­that of forgetting moderation in the intoxication of success, and justice in the plenitude of power.  It may be doubted whether, had he lived longer, he would still have deserved the tears which Germany shed over his grave, or maintained his title to the admiration with which posterity regards him as the first and only just conqueror that the world has produced.  The untimely fall of their great leader seemed to threaten the ruin of his party; but to the Power which rules the world, no loss of a single man is irreparable.  As the helm of war dropped from the hand of the falling hero, it was seized by two great statesmen, Oxenstiern and Richelieu.  Destiny still pursued its relentless course, and for full sixteen years longer the flames of war blazed over the ashes of the long-forgotten king and soldier.

I may now be permitted to take a cursory retrospect of Gustavus Adolphus in his victorious career; glance at the scene in which he alone was the great actor; and then, when Austria becomes reduced to extremity by the successes of the Swedes, and by a series of disasters is driven to the most humiliating and desperate expedients, to return to the history of the Emperor.