news of the "unspeakable" Turk, whom she
had such good cause to watch and dread. For fifty years his name had
ceased to blanch the cheek of other nations; but now it was said, and
said truly, that the dying Selim, "the Grim," had forged a thunderbolt
which Suleyman II. would not be slow to hurl. No man could know the
worst or dared predict the end, as to that Yellow Terror of Holbein's
time. And closer still, to keen eyes, were the threats of the coming
Peasant Terror. Wurtemberg had battened down the flames, it is true;
but the deck of Europe was hot under foot with the passions that were
soon to make the Turks' atrocities seem gentle in comparison.

The death of Maximilian and the election of Charles V. were a year old
now. But none knew better than the Basel printers how much the League
of Swabia and the Swiss Confederation had weighed in the close contest
of claims between those three strangely youthful competitors for the
Emperor's crown;--Charles, but nineteen; Francis I., one-and-twenty;
and Henry VIII., not twenty-five. Basel also knew that Charles had only
bought his triumph by swearing to summon the Diet of Worms. All the
more, therefore, was she intensely alive to the possible issues of the
Arabian-Nights-Entertainment which had but just concluded on the dreary
Calais flats when Holbein became one of Basel's citizens. Erasmus had
come back full of it. Marco Polo's best wonders made but a dingy show
beside the "Field of the Cloth of Gold," where in this June the two
defeated candidates for imperial honours had kissed each other midway
between the ruined moat of Guisnes and the rased battlements of Arde.

Then, on top of this, came the rumours of the English King's undertaking
to answer Luther's most formidable attack on Rome. It was in 1520, the
year after his great disputation with Eck at Leipzig, that Luther
published his cataclysmic addresses: "To the Christian Nobles of
Germany" and "On the Babylonian Captivity,"--the latter of which itself
contains the whole Protestant Reformation in embryo. "Would to God,"
exclaimed Erasmus of it, "that he had followed my counsel and abstained
from odious and seditious proceedings!" Bishop Tunstall, then in Worms,
had also written of it:--"I pray God keep that book out of England!" But
before the year was out "that book" had reached England, and Henry VIII.
had sworn to annihilate its arguments and to triumphantly defend the
dogmas of Rome. The eagerly-awaited "Defence"