inst the
Swan Inn. There had of course been history before that, but 'nothing so
clear, nothing so peculiarly swell, nothing that so united the glory of
this world and the next as that of the prince-bishops. They had made the
Marienburg their home, and kept it against foreign and domestic foes for
five hundred years. Shut within its well-armed walls they had awed
the often-turbulent city across the Main; they had held it against the
embattled farmers in the Peasants' War, and had splendidly lost it to
Gustavus Adolphus, and then got it back again and held it till Napoleon
took it from them. He gave it with their flock to the Bavarians, who
in turn briefly yielded it to the Prussians in 1866, and were now in
apparently final possession of it.

Before the prince-bishops, Charlemagne and Barbarossa had come and
gone, and since the prince-bishops there had been visiting thrones and
kingdoms enough in the ancient city, which was soon to be illustrated
by the presence of imperial Germany, royal, Wirtemberg and Saxony,
grand-ducal Baden and Weimar, and a surfeit of all the minor potentates
among those who speak the beautiful language of the Ja.

But none of these could dislodge the prince-bishops from that supreme
place which they had at once taken in Mrs. March's fancy. The potentates
were all going to be housed in the vast palace which the prince-bishops
had built themselves in Wurzburg as soon as they found it safe to come
down from their stronghold of Marienburg, and begin to adorn their city,
and to confirm it in its intense fidelity to the Church. Tiepolo had
come up out of Italy to fresco their palace, where he wrought year after
year, in that worldly taste which has somehow come to express the most
sovereign moment of ecclesiasticism. It prevailed so universally in
Wurzburg that it left her with the name of the Rococo City, intrenched
in a period of time equally remote from early Christianity and modern
Protestantism. Out of her sixty thousand souls, only ten thousand are
now of the reformed religion, and these bear about the same relation to
the Catholic spirit of the place that the Gothic architecture bears to
the baroque.

As long as the prince-bishops lasted the Wurzburgers got on very well
with but one newspaper, and perhaps the smallest amount of merrymaking
known outside of the colony of Massachusetts Bay at the same epoch. The
prince-bishops had their finger in everybody's pie, and they portioned
out the cak