f the Church, and bestowed upon his victorious general the
revenues of provinces. He now resolved to pursue the King of Denmark
into his remotest territories, to dethrone the King of Sweden, to give
away the crown of Poland, to aid the Spaniards in the recovery of the
United Provinces, to exterminate the Protestant religion, to subvert the
liberties of the German nations, and reign as a terrible incarnation of
imperial tyranny. He would even revive the dreams of Charlemagne and
Charles V., and make Vienna the centre of that power which once emanated
from Borne. He would ally himself more strongly with the Pope, and
extend the double tyranny of priests and kings over the whole continent
of Europe. Fines, imprisonments, tortures, banishments, and executions
were now added to the desolations which one hundred and fifty thousand
soldiers inflicted on villages and cities that had been for generations
increasing in wealth and prosperity.

In that dark hour of calamity and fears, Providence raised up a greater
hero than Wallenstein, a noble protector and intrepid deliverer, even
Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden; and the third act of the political
tragedy opens with his brilliant career.

Carlyle has somewhere said: "Is not every genius an impossibility until
he appear?" This is singularly true of Gustavus Adolphus. It was the
last thing for contemporaries to conjecture that the deliverer of
Germany, and the great hero of the Thirty Years' War, would have arisen
in the ice-bound regions of northern Europe. No great character had
arisen in Sweden of exalted fame, neither king nor poet, nor
philosopher, nor even singer. The little kingdom, to all appearance, was
rich only in mines of iron and hills of snow. It was not till the middle
of the sixteenth century that Sweden was even delivered from base
dependence on Denmark.

But Gustavus before he was thirty-five years of age had made his
countrymen a nation of soldiers; had freed his kingdom from Danish,
Russian, and Polish enemies; had made great improvements in the art of
war, having introduced a new system of tactics never materially improved
except by Frederic II.; had reduced strategy to a science; had raised
the importance of the infantry, had increased the strictness of military
discipline, had trained up a band of able generals, and inspired his
soldiers with unbounded enthusiasm.

And he had raised in the camp a new tone of moral feeling. Not even
Cromwell equalled hi