also got Baireuth, his poor
Cousin's Inheritance;--sole heir, he now, in Culmbath, the Line of
Casimir being out.

One owns to a kind of love for poor Albert Alcibiades. In certain sordid
times, even a "Failure of a Fritz" is better than some Successes that
are going. A man of some real nobleness, this Albert; though not with
wisdom enough, not with good fortune enough. Could he have continued
to "rule the situation" (as our French friends phrase it); to march the
fanatical Papistries, and Kaiser Karl, clear out of it, home to Spain
and San Justo a little earlier; to wave the coming Jesuitries away, as
with a flaming sword; to forbid beforehand the doleful Thirty-Years War,
and the still dolefuler spiritual atrophy (the flaccid Pedantry, ever
rummaging and rearranging among learned marine-stores, which thinks
itself Wisdom and Insight; the vague maunderings, flutings; indolent,
impotent daydreaming and tobacco-smoking, of poor Modern Germany) which
has followed therefrom,--ACH GOTT, he might have been a "SUCCESS of a
Fritz" three times over! He might have been a German Cromwell; beckoning
his People to fly, eagle-like, straight towards the Sun; instead
of screwing about it in that sad, uncertain, and far too spiral
manner!--But it lay not in him; not in his capabilities or
opportunities, after all: and we but waste time in such speculations.

Chapter VIII. -- HISTORICAL MEANING OF THE REFORMATION.

The Culmbach Brothers, we observe, play a more important part in that
era than their seniors and chiefs of Brandenburg. These Culmbachers,
Margraf George aud Albert of Preussen at the head of them, march
valiantly forward in the Reformation business; while KUR-BRANDENBURG,
Joachim I., their senior Cousin, is talking loud at Diets, galloping to
Innspruck and the like, zealous on the Conservative side; and Cardinal
Albert, KUR-MAINZ, his eloquent brother, is eager to make matters smooth
and avoid violent methods.

The Reformation was the great Event of that Sixteenth Century; according
as a man did something in that, or did nothing and obstructed doing, has
he much claim to memory, or no claim, in this age of ours. The more it
becomes apparent that the Reformation was the Event then transacting
itself, was the thing that Germany and Europe either did or refused to
do, the more does the historical significance of men attach itself to
the phases of that transaction. Accordingly we notice henceforth that
the memorable p