state which required knowledge
and skill in business, as well as the most important posts as
ambassadors, were generally filled by burghers, and whilst the nobility
seemed only capable of holding the higher court appointments, it was
generally found necessary to send the son of a shoemaker, or of a
village pastor, to a foreign court as the representative of sovereign
dignity, and to make the noble courtier his subordinate travelling
chamberlain. Thus the country nobility continued to vegetate--sometimes
struggling against the new times, at others serving obsequiously, till,
in the Thirty years' war, those of superior character were drawn into
the violent struggle, and the weaker sank still lower.

Hans von Schweinichen lived during this period of transition, which was
about the end of the sixteenth century; he was a Silesian nobleman of
old family, groom of the bedchamber, chamberlain, and factotum of the
Quixotic Duke Heinrich XI. of Liegnitz. We see the characters of both,
in juxta-position in two biographies written by Schweinichen. One is
the account of his own life, 'Life and Adventures of the Silesian
Knight, Hans von Schweinichen, published by Buesching, three parts,
1820;' the other an extract from it, with some alterations and
additions: 'The Life of Duke Heinrich XI., published in Stenzel;
Script. Rer. Siles. iv.,' both, works of great value as a history of
the manners of the sixteenth century.

The old royal house of Silesian Piastens produced, with a few
exceptions, a set of wild, wrong-headed rulers, with great pretensions
and small powers.

One of the most remarkable among them is Heinrich XI. von Liegnitz, the
dissolute son of a worthless father. When the latter, Duke Friedrich
III. was deposed by the Imperial commissioners in the year 1559, and
put under arrest as a disturber of the community, the government of the
principality devolved upon his son, then twenty years of age. After ten
years of misrule he quarrelled with his brother Friedrich and his
nobility, and in a fit of despotic humour caused the States of the
duchy to be all imprisoned. Whilst the indignant members were appealing
against him to the Emperor, he himself undertook an adventurous
expedition through Germany, making the round of numerous courts and
towns as a beggar, during which, the lack of money plunged him into one
embarrassment after another, and led him into every kind of unworthy
action. Meanwhile he was suspended, and his br