rivals, and he had successively not only conquered, but captured almost every potentate who had arrayed himself in arms against him.  Clement and Francis, the Dukes and Landgraves of, Clever, Hesse, Saxony, and Brunswick, he had bound to his chariot wheels; forcing many to eat the bread of humiliation and captivity, during long and weary years.  But the concluding portion of his reign had reversed all its previous glories.  His whole career had been a failure.  He had been defeated, after all, in most of his projects.  He had humbled Francis, but Henry had most signally avenged his father.  He had trampled upon Philip of Hesse and Frederic of Saxony, but it had been reserved for one of that German race, which he characterized as “dreamy, drunken, and incapable of intrigue,” to outwit the man who had outwitted all the world, and to drive before him, in ignominious flight, the conqueror of the nations.  The German lad who had learned both war and dissimulation in the court and camp of him who was so profound a master of both arts, was destined to eclipse his teacher on the most august theatre of Christendom.  Absorbed at Innspruck with the deliberations of the Trent Council, Charles had not heeded the distant mutterings of the tempest which was gathering around him.  While he was preparing to crush, forever, the Protestant Church, with the arms which a bench of bishops were forging, lo! the rapid and desperate Maurice, with long red beard streaming like a meteor in the wind, dashing through the mountain passes, at the head of his lancers—­arguments more convincing than all the dogmas of Granvelle!  Disguised as an old woman, the Emperor had attempted on the 6th April, to escape in a peasant’s wagon, from Innspruck into Flanders.  Saved for the time by the mediation of Ferdinand, he had, a few weeks later, after his troops had been defeated by Maurice, at Fussen, again fled at midnight of the 22nd May, almost unattended, sick in body and soul, in the midst of thunder, lightning, and rain, along the difficult Alpine passes from Innspruck into Carinthia.  His pupil had permitted his escape, only because in his own language, “for such a bird he had no convenient cage.”  The imprisoned princes now owed their liberation, not to the Emperor’s clemency, but to his panic.  The peace of Passau, in the following August, crushed the whole fabric of the Emperor’s toil, and laid-the foundation of the Protestant Church.  He had smitten the Protestants at Muhlberg for the last time.  On the other hand, the man who had dealt with Rome, as if the Pope, not he, had been the vassal, was compelled to witness, before he departed, the insolence of a pontiff who took a special pride in insulting and humbling his house, and trampling upon the pride of Charles, Philip and Ferdinand.  In France too, the disastrous siege of Metz had taught him that in the imperial zodiac the fatal sign of Cancer had been reached.  The figure of a crab, with the words “plus citra,” instead of his proud motto of “plus