He is less an individual man than an embodiment of a thousand thoughts, instincts, emotions. But then-and that is the secret of his triumph-these thoughts and emotions are our own. Different as our sphere of destiny may be from Wallenstein's, the texture of life, whether the fabric be small or great, has its warp and woof of the same hopes, fears, meditations, disappointments; and Wallenstein has a word suited for every mood of him who is struggling to attain success in life, or struggling to keep his position there. It is we, in short, who are Wallenstein. And it is in this point of view that the thread of superstition, which Schiller took from his historical authorities, is so wonderfully interwoven in the poet's design. That superstition seems almost an anomalous trait in a spirit so refined and cultivated as the dramatic Wallenstein's: it has no overpowering influence; he can throw it at times altogether aside but it is a pervading agency, mixing with all others, and making him, not inferior-as in the hands of a less skilful artist he would have become-but superior to his fellows, men trained only in this world's ordinary cunning. Now, for us, or most of us, in this waning nineteenth century-for those, at least, who cannot get up any interest in material communications with the invisible world conveyed by table-turning and spirit-rapping, cold hands under green baize, and ghosts playing accordionssuch vague and shadowy impulses as those which haunt the mind of Schiller's hero, rather than influence his firm judgement, constitute the last influences whereby the 'anarch old' Superstition still maintains a relic of her dominion. Who is there among us whose heart has not seemed to move in unison with his, when he exclaims that

There are moments in the life of man

When he is nearer to the world's great Spirit
Than is his wont, and may at pleasure ask

One question of his Fate. "T was such a moment
When I, upon the eve of Lützen fight,

Leaning against a tree and full of thoughts,

Gazed forth upon the plain ?

or, when, in the ominous darkness of the night of his murder, he longs for one glimpse of Jupiter

Methinks

Could I but see him, all were well with me;

He is the star of my nativity,

And often marvellously hath his aspect

Shot strength into my heart?

And so farewell to Wallenstein and to Gustavus; characters over which the imagination lingers, though one was assuredly both worse and lower than his reputation; the other so far elevated by fate and his high purpose above the ordinary sons of men that he loses something of mere human interest. Such as they were, they left no successor behind them. Except the short-lived hero, Bernard of Saxe Weimar, no subsequent personage of that war has made any appreciable mark in history. Uncontrolled by master spirits, the contest lingered on, bloodier and more indecisive, till, out of the two parties, the one bent on subjugation, the other on independence, a mere confused and mangled residue remained, with scarcely voice enough left to expend in feeble groanings for peace at any price. Famine, sword, and pestilence had uprooted a whole generation. Equal horrors may have occurred in barbarous countries, but never, assuredly, in a civilised and Christian community like that of Germany, where numberless active pens were engaged in chronicling them. Its population, say some authorities, shrank from sixteen or eighteen millions to four millions. Whether this be accurate or no, one curious evidence of the extent of depopulation is to be found in its forest history. The country had thriven so greatly in the fifteenth and

sixteenth centuries, that its vast sylvan riches were beginning to show symptoms of exhaustion. In North Germany numerous edicts were issued before A.D. 1600 for the preservation of the woods. It is recorded of a certain Duke Augustus of Saxony, that on his walks, he always carried a hollow brass rod filled with acorns, to drop one by one into the ground. There are three things, Melanchthon used to say, which will fail before the end of the world comes: good friends, good money, and fire-wood. The Thirty Years' War effectually adjourned the last of these complaints to another age. The forest covered again whole tracts which had been under cultivation. What with the diminution of people, and what with the increase of wood, no need of the old kind seems to have been again felt until the middle of the eighteenth century; and it is said that the forests had then become so overgrown, that the tempestuous seasons which prevailed in 1780-1790 destroyed many square miles of them. Germany went back in cultivation, and in public spirit and independence, even more than in mere numbers; it required a Frederick the Great to raise her again after a hundred years, and that but partially; and even the Germany of the nineteenth century, in which political lags so far behind every other class of thought, bears the impress of that long reign of darkness and terror which broke down the medieval spirit of self-govern

ment.

.A VISIT TO MARSTON MOOR,

MAY 1861.

THE two bloodiest battles ever fought on English ground, and between Englishmen, took place in the plain southwest of York, and within a few miles of each other. The first on that snowy Palm Sunday of 1461, at Towton, when Edward, at the head of his southern army, discomfited the Lancastrians of the north with such a slaughter, that Southey was almost justified in his laureate-like vaunt→

Half the blood which there was spent
Had sufficed to win again

Anjou and ill-yielded Maine,
Normandy and Aquitaine.

6

The second in the long Midsummer twilight of July 2, 1644, when Fairfax and Rupert, tired of manoeuvrings for which neither had genius nor appetite, met on Marston Moor to have it out, like two schoolboys in the fightingground,' and left some four thousand British dead as the evidence of their brilliant but unnecessary valour. The name of Marston Moor appeals, perhaps, more to the imagination than that of any other field of our great civil war partly from a certain amount of poetry and romance which has been expended on it; partly because it was (though indirectly rather than directly) the most important action, and turning-point of the contest; while at the same time its features are very confusedly represented in ordinary narratives. This is owing in great measure to the brief and fierce character of the struggle, which, with its

many changes of fortune, was fought out between seven o'clock and night: somewhat also to the want of historians. All the penmen were absent: Clarendon with the king; Whitelock in London; Ludlow in the south; all too distant to get accounts of the engagement, except from hearsay some time after. We have the stories of some eye-witnesses, such as the Reverend Mr. Ashe, chaplain with Lord Manchester's force; the Scottish Captain Stuart, who gives the Presbyterian version; Leonard Watson, scoutmaster to Oliver Cromwell, who tells his tale in a way satisfactory to the Independents; and the unfortunate Royalist, Sir Henry Slingsby, who afterwards died for his cause on the scaffold. Sir Henry lived close by, at Red House, in Moor Monkton, and his notices of the ground, with which he was so familiar, are valuable. There is also Fairfax's own modest and spirited account; and a few rather indistinct passages cited by Eliot Warburton, in his Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers,' from the so-called 'Diary of Prince Rupert.' But each witness saw only that portion of the battle-piece in which he was himself engaged; no practised writer of the day took the trouble to condense and analyse the narratives. Modern accounts, says Carlyle, are worthless;' poor Eliot Warburton's only a spirited romance; Mr. Forster's vivid incidental sketches too slight for our present purpose. But an exception must now be made for Mr. Sanford ('Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebellion'), whose accuracy in describing the ground I have had occasion to test, and whose copious historical narrative can scarcely be more than abridged. Some portions of it, however, are not easy to understand, and some of his authorities seem questionable.

The readiest approach to the battle-field at this day is from Marston station, six miles from York, on the Knaresborough line. Hence a lane leads for about two miles