ated, and whom they thoroughly despised.

But turning away from France, it was in vain for them to look for kings
or men either among friends or foes. In Germany religious dissensions
were gradually ripening into open war, and it would be difficult to
imagine a more hopelessly incompetent ruler than the man who was
nominally chief of the Holy Roman Realm. Yet the distracted Rudolph was
quite as much an emperor as the chaos over which he was supposed to
preside was an empire. Perhaps the very worst polity ever devised by
human perverseness was the system under which the great German race was
then writhing and groaning. A mad world with a lunatic to govern it; a
democracy of many princes, little and big, fighting amongst each other,
and falling into daily changing combinations as some masterly or
mischievous hand whirled the kaleidoscope; drinking Rhenish by hogsheads,
and beer by the tun; robbing churches, dictating creeds to their
subjects, and breaking all the commandments themselves; a people at the
bottom dimly striving towards religious freedom and political life out of
abject social, ecclesiastical, and political serfdom, and perhaps even
then dumbly feeling within its veins, with that prophetic instinct which
never abandons great races, a far distant and magnificent Future of
national unity and Imperial splendour, the very reverse of the confusion
which was then the hideous Present; an Imperial family at top with many
heads and slender brains; a band of brothers and cousins wrangling,
intriguing, tripping up each others' heels, and unlucky Rudolph, in his
Hradschin, looking out of window over the peerless Prague, spread out in
its beauteous landscape of hill and dale, darkling forest, dizzy cliffs,
and rushing river, at his feet, feebly cursing the unhappy city for its
ingratitude to an invisible and impotent sovereign; his excellent brother
Matthias meanwhile marauding through the realms and taking one crown
after another from his poor bald head.

It would be difficult to depict anything more precisely what an emperor
in those portentous times should not be. He collected works of art of
many kinds--pictures, statues, gems. He passed his days in his galleries
contemplating in solitary grandeur these treasures, or in his stables,
admiring a numerous stud of horses which he never drove or rode.
Ambassadors and ministers of state disguised themselves as grooms and
stable-boys to obtain accidental glimpses of a sovere