terror into the minds of potential enemies, and of acting as a decorative body-guard to enhance his own public appearances on gala days.  He threw his whole soul into the enterprise.  After the corps had been duly established, he amused himself by drilling them on Sunday afternoons and modelling new buttons for their uniforms; to give them the requisite military stamina he over-fed and starved them by turns, wrapped them in sheepskin overcoats for long route-marches in July, exercised them in sham fights with live grapeshot and unblunted stilettos and otherwise thinned their ranks of undesirables, and hardened their physique, by forcing them to escalade horrible precipices at midnight on horseback.  He was a martinet; he knew it; he gloried on the distinction.  “All the world loves a disciplinarian,” he was wont to say.

Nevertheless, like many great princes, he realized that political reasons might counsel at times an abatement of rigour.  He could relent and show mercy.  He could interpose his authority in favour of the condemned.

He relented on one celebrated occasion which more than any other helped to gain for him the epithet of “The Good”—­when an entire squadron of the Militia was condemned to death for some supposed mistake in giving the salute.  The record, unfortunately, is somewhat involved in obscurity and hard to disentangle; so much is clear, however, that the sentence was duly promulgated and carried into effect within half an hour.  Then comes the moot question of the officer in command who was obviously destined for execution with the rest of his men and who now profited, as events proved, by the clemency of the Good Duke.  It appears that this individual, noted for a childlike horror of bloodshed (especially when practiced on his own person), had unaccountably absented himself from the ceremony at the last moment—­slipping out of the ranks in order, as he said, to bid a last farewell to his two aged and widowed parents.  He was discovered in a wine-shop and brought before a hastily summoned Court-martial.  There his old military courage seems to have returned to him.  He demonstrated by a reference to the instructions laid down in the Militiaman’s Year-book that no mistake in saluting had been made, that his men had therefore been wrongfully convicted and illegally executed and that he A fortiori, was innocent of any felonious intent.  The Court, while approving his arguments, condemned him none the less to the indignity of a double decapitation for the offence of leaving his post without a signed permit from His Highness.

It was at this point that the Good Duke interposed on his behalf.  He rescinded the decree; in other words, he relented.  “Enough of bloodshed for one day,” he was heard to remark, quite simply.