hardened, received a
fearful blow from a dagger; there was no wound to be seen, but he died
shortly after from the internal effect of the blow. In 1558 there was
an invulnerable soldier in the regiment of Count Lichtenstein, who,
after every skirmish, shook the enemy's balls off his dress and his
bare body; he often showed them, and the holes burnt through his
clothes; he was at last slain by some foreign peasants.

When the Italians and Spaniards entered the Netherlands in 1568, they
carried along with them, with little success, whole packets and books
full of magic formulas of conjurations and charms. The French found
talismans and magic cards fastened round the necks of the prisoners and
the dead, of the Brandenburg troops who had been led by Burgrave Fabian
von Dohna, in 1587, as auxiliaries to the Huguenots. When the Jesuit
George Scheerer preached at the Court Chapel at Vienna in 1594, before
the Archduke Matthias and his Generals, he found it necessary to exhort
them earnestly against the use of superstitious charms for cuts, stabs,
shots, and burns.

It is therefore unjust in later writers to state, that the art of
rendering invulnerable was introduced at Passau by a travelling scholar
in the seventeenth century, as Grimmelshausen informs us, or as others
will have it, that it was brought into the German army by Kaspar
Reithardt von Hersbruck, the executioner; for when Archduke Leopold,
the Bishop of Passau, raised the reckless and ill-disciplined bands
which spread terror through Alsace and Bohemia by their barbarities,
his soldiers only adopted the old traditions which were rooted in
German heathenism, and had lingered on through the whole of the middle
ages; nay, even the name, "_Passau art_," which has been customary
since then, may rest on a misunderstanding of the people, for in the
sixteenth century all who bore charms about them to render them
invulnerable were called by the learned soldier, "_Pessulanten_," or
"_Charakteristiker_," and whoever understood the art of dissolving a
charm was a "_Solvent_." It is possible that the first of these popular
designations was changed into "_Passauer_."

Even in the first year of the Thirty years' war, the art of rendering
invulnerable was eagerly discussed. A good account of it can be found
in 'The true narrative of the siege and capture by storm of the city of
Pilsen in Bohemia, 1619.' The passage according to our dialect is as
follows:

"An adventurer under