r-Sachsen broke away again; made
his Peace of Prag, [1635, 20th May (Stenzel, i. 513).] whom Brandenburg
again followed; Brandenburg and gradually all the others, except the
noble Wilhelm of Hessen-Cassel alone. Miserable Peace; bit of Chaos
clouted up, and done over with Official varnish;--which proved to be the
signal for continuing the War beyond visible limits, and rendering peace
impossible.

After this, George Wilhelm retires from the scene; lives in Custrin
mainly; mere miserable days, which shall be invisible to us. He died in
1640; and, except producing an active brave Son very unlike himself, did
nothing considerable in the world. _"Que faire; ils ont des canons!"_

Among the innumerable sanguinary tusslings of this War are counted Three
great Battles, Leipzig, Lutzen, Nordlingen. Under one great Captain,
Swedish Gustav, and the two or three other considerable Captains, who
appeared in it, high passages of furious valor, of fine strategy and
tactic, are on record. But on the whole, the grand weapon in it, and
towards the latter times the exclusive one, was Hunger. The opposing
Armies tried to starve one another; at lowest, tried each not to starve.
Each trying to eat the country, or at any rate to leave nothing eatable
in it: what that will mean for the country, we may consider. As the
Armies too frequently, and the Kaiser's Armies habitually, lived without
commissariat, often enough without pay, all horrors of war and of being
a seat of war, that have been since heard of, are poor to those then
practised. The detail of which is still horrible to read. Germany, in
all eatable quarters of it, had to undergo the process;--tortured, torn
to pieces, wrecked, and brayed as in a mortar under the iron mace of
war. [Curious incidental details of the state it was reduced to, in the
Rhine and Danube Countries, turn up in the Earl of Arundel and Surrey's
TRAVELS ("Arundel of the Marbles") as _Ambassador Extraordinary to the
Emperor Ferdinando II. in 1636_ (a small Volume, or Pamphlet, London,
1637).] Brandenburg saw its towns sieged and sacked, its country
populations driven to despair, by the one party and the other. Three
times,--first in the Wallenstein Mecklenburg period, while fire and
sword were the weapons, and again, twice over, in the ultimate stages of
the struggle, when starvation had become the method--Brandenburg fell to
be the principal theatre of conflict, where all forms of the dismal
were at their heigh