tury, and who had
built, on a forgotten Roman work, the fortress of the Marienburg on that
vineyarded hill over against the Swan Inn. There had of course been
history before that, but 'nothing so clear, nothing so peculiarly swell,
nothing that so united the glory of this world and the next as that of
the prince-bishops. They had made the Marienburg their home, and kept it
against foreign and domestic foes for five hundred years. Shut within its
well-armed walls they had awed the often-turbulent city across the Main;
they had held it against the embattled farmers in the Peasants' War, and
had splendidly lost it to Gustavus Adolphus, and then got it back again
and held it till Napoleon took it from them. He gave it with their flock
to the Bavarians, who in turn briefly yielded it to the Prussians in
1866, and were now in apparently final possession of it.

Before the prince-bishops, Charlemagne and Barbarossa had come and gone,
and since the prince-bishops there had been visiting thrones and kingdoms
enough in the ancient city, which was soon to be illustrated by the
presence of imperial Germany, royal, Wirtemberg and Saxony, grand-ducal
Baden and Weimar, and a surfeit of all the minor potentates among those
who speak the beautiful language of the Ja.

But none of these could dislodge the prince-bishops from that supreme
place which they had at once taken in Mrs. March's fancy. The potentates
were all going to be housed in the vast palace which the prince-bishops
had built themselves in Wurzburg as soon as they found it safe to come
down from their stronghold of Marienburg, and begin to adorn their city,
and to confirm it in its intense fidelity to the Church. Tiepolo had come
up out of Italy to fresco their palace, where he wrought year after year,
in that worldly taste which has somehow come to express the most
sovereign moment of ecclesiasticism. It prevailed so universally in
Wurzburg that it left her with the name of the Rococo City, intrenched in
a period of time equally remote from early Christianity and modern
Protestantism. Out of her sixty thousand souls, only ten thousand are now
of the reformed religion, and these bear about the same relation to the
Catholic spirit of the place that the Gothic architecture bears to the
baroque.

As long as the prince-bishops lasted the Wurzburgers got on very well
with but one newspaper, and perhaps the smallest amount of merrymaking
known outside of the colony of Massachus