the priests represented them to the peasantry as monsters, the children of hell, and their leader as Antichrist.  No wonder, then, if they thought themselves released from all the ties of nature and humanity toward this brood of Satan, and justified in committing the most savage atrocities upon them.  Woe to the Swedish soldier who fell into their hands!  All the torments which inventive malice could devise were exercised upon these unhappy victims; and the sight of their mangled bodies exasperated the army to a fearful retaliation.  Gustavus Adolphus, alone, sullied the lustre of his heroic character by no act of revenge; and the aversion which the Bavarians felt toward his religion, far from making him depart from the obligations of humanity toward that unfortunate people, seemed to impose upon him the stricter duty to honor his religion by a more constant clemency.

The approach of the king spread terror and consternation in the capital, which, stripped of its defenders, and abandoned by its principal inhabitants, placed all its hopes in the magnanimity of the conqueror.  By an unconditional and voluntary surrender, it hoped to disarm his vengeance, and sent deputies even to Freysingen to lay at his feet the keys of the city.  Strongly as the king might have been tempted by the inhumanity of the Bavarians, and the hostility of their sovereign, to make a dreadful use of the rights of victory; pressed as he was by Germans to avenge the fate of Magdeburg on the capital of its destroyer, this great prince scorned this mean revenge; and the very helplessness of his enemies disarmed his severity.  Contented with the more noble triumph of conducting the Palatine Frederick with the pomp of a victor into the very palace of the prince who had been the chief instrument of his ruin and the usurper of his territories, he heightened the brilliancy of his triumphal entry by the brighter splendor of moderation and clemency.

The king found in Munich only a forsaken palace, for the Elector’s treasures had been transported to Werfen.  The magnificence of the building astonished him; and he asked the guide who showed the apartments, who was the architect.  “No other,” replied he, “than the Elector himself.”—­“I wish,” said the King, “I had this architect to send to Stockholm.”  “That,” he was answered, “the architect will take care to prevent.”  When the arsenal was examined, they found nothing but carriages, stripped of their cannon.  The latter had been so artfully concealed under the floor that no traces of them remained; and but for the treachery of a workman, the deceit would not have been detected.  “Rise up from the dead,” said the King, “and come to judgment.”  The floor was pulled up, and 140 pieces of cannon discovered, some of extraordinary calibre, which had been principally taken in the Palatinate and Bohemia.  A treasure of 30,000 gold ducats, concealed in one of the largest, completed the pleasure which the King received from this valuable acquisition.