wind's blast, never-resting, homeless," stormed so long
across war-convulsed Europe, and "left that name at which the world
grew pale to point a moral or adorn a tale." Charles the Twelfth had
just entered into an alliance with Peter the Great for an enterprise to
destroy the House of Hanover and restore the Stuarts, when the
memorable bullet at the siege of Frederickshald, in Norway, brought his
strange career to a close in December, 1718. A junction between such
men as Charles the Twelfth and Peter the Great might indeed have had
matter in it. Peter was probably the greatest sovereign born to a
throne in modern Europe. An alliance between Peter's profound sagacity
and indomitable perseverance, and Charles's unbounded courage and
military skill, might have been ominous for any cause against which it
was aimed. The good-fortune which from first to last seems on the
whole to have attended the House of Hanover, and followed it even in
spite of itself, was with it when the bullet from an unknown hand
struck down Charles the Twelfth.

[Sidenote: 1715-1718--Futility of the Triple Alliance]

These international arrangements have for us now very little real
interest. They were entirely artificial and temporary. Nothing came
of them that could long endure or make any real change in the relations
of the European States. They had hardly anything to do with the
interests of the various peoples over whose heads and without whose
knowledge or concern they were made. It was still firmly believed that
two or three diplomatists, meeting in {163} a half-clandestine way in a
minister's closet or a lady's drawing-room, could come to agreements
which would bind down nations and rule political movements. The first
real upheaving of any genuine force, national or personal, in European
life tore through all their meshes in a moment. Frederick the Great,
soon after, is to compel Europe to reconstruct her scheme of political
arrangements; later yet, the French Revolution is to clear the ground
more thoroughly and violently still. The triple alliance, concocted by
the Regent and Stanhope and Dubois, had not the slightest permanent
effect on the general condition of Europe. It was a clever and an
original idea of the Regent to think of bringing England and France,
these old hereditary enemies, into a permanent alliance, and it was
right of Stanhope to enter into the spirit of the enterprise; but the
actual conditions of England and