ning life among his family and friends. At length, after a
violent attack of palsy, the disease from which he suffered, he lay
for several days expecting death. Early in the morning of June 15,
1722, he resigned his spirit, with Christian calmness, into the hands
of his Creator.

The duke was nearly seventy-three when he died. His remains were
interred with every honor in Westminster Abbey, but soon after were
taken up, and conveyed to the chapel at Blenheim, and laid in a
magnificent monument, which the duchess had erected for this honorable
purpose.

PRINCE EUGENE OF SAVOY

By G. P. R. JAMES

(1663-1736)

[Illustration: Prince Eugene. [TN]]

Prince Eugene, the most famed of Austrian generals, was the son of
Eugene Maurice of Savoy (by the mother's side Count of Soissons) and
of Olympia Mancini, niece of Cardinal Mazarin. His father intrigued,
and was banished from the court of France; and his mother also quitted
Paris not many years after, suspected of many vices of which she was
very probably innocent; and guilty of a thousand follies, which were
more strictly scrutinized than her crimes. Eugene was originally
destined for the Church, and, according to a scandalous custom, then
common in France as well as other Catholic countries, he obtained
several benefices while but a child, of which he was eager to divest
himself as soon as his mind was capable of discriminating between one
profession and another. He seems soon to have felt within himself that
ardent desire for military service, which is sometimes a caprice and
some times an inspiration; but Louis XIV., at whose court he still
remained, positively forbade his throwing off the clerical habit,
notwithstanding all the entreaties of the young abbe, and by so doing,
incurred the enmity of one who inherited from his mother no small
faculty of hatred.

At length, various circumstances with which he was in no degree
connected, brought about a change in the affairs of Europe that
afforded him an opportunity of escaping from the restraint placed upon
his inclinations, and of turning the genius they had despised against
those who had contemned him. France and Austria had long been either
secretly or openly at strife; but now the dilapidated state of the
German empire, after tedious and expensive wars, together with the
combination of external foes and internal insurrection, threatened the
nominal successor of the Roman Caesars with utter destruction. The