By Friedrich Forster.

Pocket Book for 1887.

Published in Raumer's Historical

12mo.)

3. The Life of Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland. By Lieutenant Colonel Mitchell. 8vo. London. 1837.

FEW of those who love to loiter in the picture-gallery of his

tory, amid the painted forms of other times,' but have felt their march arrested and their attention charmed by two great figures in the compartment of the seventeenth century, Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein. There is in the former a simple sublimity-a diffused and holy lustre-which sets criticism at defiance, and the glory of the saint is distinguishable around the casque of the Protestant warrior. There is a gloom in the grandeur of the other,-a shadow of pride, and passion, and evil destiny,-which pains while it fascinates; yet, turning from both or either, we may wander with quickened step and unobservant eye through rows of warriors and through ranks of kings,' an host of crowned and helmeted and peruked nonentities, before we look on the like of either again.

Of the works now enumerated, those from the German press had engaged our attention before that of Colonel Mitchell had been announced for publication, and as we could hardly hope that the former would be communicated to the English public in the shape of translation, we were subsequently the more satisfied to find that they had furnished materials for one who, as a soldier and a linguist, was well qualified for the task of Wallenstein's biography.

From the hitherto unedited documents communicated in his own volumes of 1828, collated with others before extant, Mr. Forster has undertaken to relieve the memory of Wallenstein from the heavy imputations by which the court of Vienna endeavoured to justify his assassination, and which the historian and the dramatist have joined in accumulating upon his name. The act of accusation, supported by advocates so numerous and so various, has been for two centuries unanswered before the tribunal of Europe. We cannot, however, think that the labours of either the civilian or the soldier, in their vocation of awarding tardy justice to a great and injured man, have been bestowed in vain. It seldom happens that the minuter researches of posterity tend otherwise than to detract from the lustre of popular reputations; still seldomer that we can lift a corner of the veil from the personal and private dealings of the authors of mighty achievements, without displaying the littleness of the instruments used by Providence. for great purposes. Wise and humble men will draw moral and religious conclusions from the exposure which they must lament; but it is not to folly alone that the martyrdom of fame is dear,

and

and profligacy loves to see the warrior and the sage degraded to its own level of sensuality or corruption. It is something gained to the cause of virtue and the strength of good example, to find some spots of verdure between the Dans and Beershebas of modern historical geography,-to find civil and military greatness united in a character which gains by every investigation into its qualities; and such, after the perusal of the works before us, we pronounce the character of the Friedlander, whose epitaph has been hitherto written either by his assassins, or by men who should have paused before they followed implicitly in the track of his interested accusers. The satellites of a court which paid the price of his blood, on whom the task devolved of justifying his murder, were not likely to be candid in its execution; and proofs of their distortion and misrepresentation of facts abound in Mr. Forster's volumes. Still that Cæsar was ambitious, the Antony who now recites his funeral oration cannot deny:—that he was altogether a placid subject for the exercise of court intrigues, the arts of the civilian and the Jesuit, the Spanish diplomatist, and Italian mercenary, who worried their noble prey to his end, his admirers can hardly assert. It is not wonderful that at this distance of time the question should remain unsolved as to how far ambition lured or injury goaded their victim into any positive though tardy betrayal of his trust-or into any of those schemes of undue personal advancement which have been so lavishly imputed to him. On the most specious of these accusations we have little hesitation in passing the verdict of not proven, while we leave others to the infamy of their own palpable falsehood.

It may be well to remark that, though Schiller, throughout his brilliant but unequal narrative, seems to admit, with little question, the series of charges against Wallenstein, the concluding passage of his fourth book is strangely inconsistent with all that precedes it. Mr. Forster quotes, in his Preface, p. xv., from Schiller, the expressions perjured traitor and death-worthy criminal,'* which we have no doubt he somewhere uses, though we have failed to hit on the passage which contains them. After a detail of crimination which would go far to justify such expressions, it is strange to find him summing up in these words:

It must, after all, in justice be admitted that the pens which have handed down the history of this extraordinary man are not those of truth; that the treason of Wallenstein and his project for attaining the crown of Bohemia rest, not on acts strictly proved, but merely on probable conjectures. No document has yet been discovered which has displayed the secret springs of his conduct so as to merit the confidence of history; and among his actions, publicly known and accredited, there is none

*Meineidigen verräther und todeswürdigen verbrecher.'

which in the main might not have proceeded from a guiltless source. Many of his most vilified proceedings prove nothing more than his earnest disposition towards a peace. Most of the others are cleared up and excused by a justifiable mistrust of the emperor, and a pardonable anxiety for the maintenance of his own importance. It is true that his conduct towards the Elector of Bavaria exhibits an unworthy spirit of revenge and an unappeasable temper; but no one of his actions justifies us in considering him as convicted of treason. If necessity and despair finally drove him to deserve the sentence passed upon him when yet innocent, this cannot suffice for the justification of that sentence: in this case Wallenstein fell, not because he was a rebel, but he rebelled because he fell. It was his misfortune in life to have made an enemy of a victorious party,-in death, that this enemy survived to write his history.'Schiller's History of the Thirty Years' War. Conclusion of Fourth Book.

The mass of the original correspondence in Mr. Forster's volumes emanates from the archives of Boitzenburgh, now in the possession of the Counts of Arnheim, lineal descendants of Hans George Von Arnheim, a man whose talents both for war and diplomacy made him conspicuous even at a period so fertile in great reputations as that of the thirty years' war. We find him,

at the commencement of 1627, serving as second in command under Wallenstein, and we trace, through a correspondence continued with little interruption to the summer of 1629, proofs of the unlimited confidence which his chief reposed in him. Arnheim's transference of his services at this period to the Saxon wrought a total change in his relations to Wallenstein, and their correspondence is only occasionally renewed in the shape of negotiation between rival commanders. This change appears, however, in no respect to have diminished the mutual esteem which had grown out of their former intimacy, and their intercourse was among the grounds of accusation subsequently preferred against Wallenstein, and, as we think, among the most unjust of them. In addition to the principal mass of correspondence, hitherto unpublished, these volumes contain much information, extracted from the archives of Vienna and other sources, which, with the comments of the editor, bear upon many principal events of the time; among others, the discrepant statements respecting the death of Gustavus, and the proceedings against Wallenstein's surviving associates. The editor's own portion of the work consists in a biographical and historical account of his hero, which, after attending him from his birth to the period when the correspondence commences, forms a commentary on the latter, and is closed by a biography of Arnheim. Colonel Mitchell has profited by a subsequent work of Mr. Forster's, a life of Wallenstein, which we have failed to obtain; in which we learn, however, he has

corrected

corrected divers errors which have obtained popularity respecting the earlier career of Wallenstein, and which had found a place in the volumes of 1828.

The smaller treatise, published in Raumer's Annual, is curiously illustrative of the man and the manners of the time, and perhaps more entertaining than the graver materials for historical disquisition contained in the larger work.

After having devoted our attention to these German publications, we were pleased to find that our conclusions on the main points at issue were in accordance with those of Colonel Mitchell. That author has endeavoured to compress into one volume a general view of the war, together with the biography which forms the attractive title to his work. His qualifications for his task are considerable. To a profession which makes his subject a congenial one, he unites, we believe, an intimate acqaintance with the language, the people, and the topography of the great theatre of the achievements he records. With these appliances he has produced a book, in our judgment, of sterling merit, bearing evidence of the cultivation of that valuable and often neglected material, a soldier's leisure, and which can scarcely be perused without communicating to its reader the author's enthusiasm on behalf of his hero. The Colonel has resisted with determination all temptation to prolixity or diffuseness of extract, and has shown skill and good taste in the condensation of his materials.

It would be difficult to find in modern history, previous to the French revolution, a parallel to the rapid elevation of Albert Wenzel Eusebius von Waldstein, born at the castle of Hermanie in 1583.' It is true that he started with the advantages of noble birth and the education of a gentleman, which the heroes of revolutionized France were able to dispense with in their progress to fieldmarshalships and thrones. In virtue, however, of the Bohemian law of inheritance, Albert's father had shared the family possessions with thirteen brothers, and in his own case the estate was further frittered down through two brothers and three sisters. Like the Soults and Murats, however, he was throwu upon times when wealth as well as fame was the reward of military exploitto those at least who chose the stronger side in the great religious struggle which, commencing in Bohemia at the period of his adolescence, rapidly drew the rest of Germany into its bloody

vortex.

We have said that Mr. Forster's most recent researches have disproved some of the popular anecdotes of Wallenstein's early life. Among these are the stories of his turbulence at the Altdorf College-one of which has been popularized by the dramatic pen of Schiller-and the Jesuits' version of his conver

sion to Romanism. These being dismissed from the record, we must be content to remain in ignorance of any early peculiarities or indications of his future character, and to ascribe his departure from the faith of his Protestant parents to causes more probable than a fall from a window, which may but too easily be found in the worldly advantages likely to be derived from his adoption of a dominant religion. We know, however, that the talents destined to play so conspicuous a part in war and politics were previously matured by travel and study. He was attended in his peregrinations through France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands, by Paulus Virdingus, a correspondent of Kepler, who probably first directed his attention to those astrological studies, which, like the wizard namesake of Sir Walter Scott, he pursued in Padua far beyond the sea,' under Argoli, a professor of reputation in that pretended science. It would perhaps be difficult to find among the great men of that day an exception to its votaries—even among those who rejected not only the evidence of revealed, but of natural religion.

Wallenstein's first military service was performed under Rodolph, King of Hungary, against the Turks, in 1606. On the peace which took place in that year he returned to Bohemia, to enter on his small inheritance, and shortly to increase it by a marriage of prudence with an elderly and widowed heiress, Lucretia Nikessin von Landeck, who, at her death, in 1614, left him rich possessions in Moravia, and a considerable personalty. The cultivation of these resources appears for some years to have distracted his attention from the opportunities for military advancement, which the troubles of the time and the fraternal feuds between the Emperor Matthias and Rodolph might have afforded him. It is not till the year 1617 that we find him again in arms, at the head of two hundred cavalry, raised by himself, for the service of the Archduke Ferdinand of Styria against the Venetians. The campaign was insignificant, but the siege of Gradisca afforded the young leader some opportunities of distinction under the eye of Ferdinand, the future Emperor, and thus laid the foundation of his relations to that Sovereign. His appointment to a military command in Olmutz, and his second marriage to the daughter of a favourite of Ferdinand, the Count Harrach, soon followed. The religious contest in Bohemia now assumed a character which could no longer have permitted one less interested than Wallenstein in the fortunes of that country to remain a mere observer of its progress. If we may judge of Wallenstein by the whole tenor of the correspondence before us and of his conduct, no Romanist of his age was less fitted than himself to become a persecutor. No passage, indeed, of his life

or