The duke was then fifty years of age.  He defended himself, in his conversations with Mirabeau, from the charge of loving war.  “Battles are games of chance,” said he to the French traveller:  “up to this time I have been fortunate.  Who knows if to-day, although more lucky, I should be as well used by fortune?” A year after this remark he made the triumphant invasion of Holland, at the head of the troops of England.  Some years later Germany nominated him generalissimo.

But war with France, however it might be grateful to his ambition as a soldier, was repugnant to his mind as a philosopher.  He felt he should but ill carry out the ideas in which he had been educated.  Mirabeau had made that profound remark, which prophesied the weaknesses and defects of a coalition guided by that prince:  “This man is of a rare stamp, but he is too much of a sage to be feared by sages.”

This phrase explains the offer of the crown of France made to the Duke of Brunswick by Custine, in the name of the monarchical portion of the Assembly.  Freemasonry, that underground religion, into which nearly all the reigning princes of Germany had entered, concealed beneath its mysteries secret understandings between French philosophy and the sovereigns on the banks of the Rhine.  Brothers in a religious conspiracy, they could not be very bitter enemies in politics.  The Duke of Brunswick was in the depth of his heart more the citizen than the prince—­more the Frenchman than the German.  The offer of a throne at Paris had pleased his fancy.  He fights not against a people, whose king he hopes to be, and against a cause, which he desires to conquer, but not to destroy.  Such was the state of the Duke of Brunswick’s mind;—­consulted by the king of Prussia, he advised this monarch to turn his forces to the Polish frontier and conquer provinces there, instead of principles in France.

VI.

Dumouriez’s plan was to separate, as much as possible, Prussia from Austria, in order to have but one enemy at a time to cope with; and the union of these two powers, natural and jealous rivals of each other, appeared to him so totally unnatural, that he flattered himself he could prevent or sever it.  The instinctive hatred of despotism for liberty, however, overthrew all his schemes.  Russia, through the ascendency of Catherine, forced Prussia and Austria to make common cause against the Revolution.  At Vienna, the young Emperor Francis I. made far greater preparations for war than for negotiation.  The Prince de Kaunitz, his principal minister, replied to the notes of Dumouriez in language that seemed a defiance of the Assembly.  Dumouriez laid these documents before the Assembly, and forestalled the expressions of their just indignation, by bursting himself into patriotic anger.  The contre coup of these scenes was felt even in the cabinet of the emperor at Vienna, where Francis I., pale and trembling