CHARLES XII.

CHARLES XII., born in 1682, was a boy of fifteen, when the leath of his father made him King of Sweden. His mother had died some years before. According to the ancient laws of the kingdom, he had a right to reign at the age of fifteen; but his father, who was a very self-willed and despotic monarch, ordered in his will that he should not exercise authority until he was eighteen, and that until then his grandmother should be the regent.

Charles was a soldier almost from his infancy. At seven he could ride the most spirited horse, and, during all his boyhood, he took pleasure in those violent out-of-door exercises which harden and strengthen the constitution. He was exceedingly obstinate, and, like most obstinate people, was sometimes led by the nose. For example: He would not learn Latin; but when he was artfully told that the King of Denmark and the King of Poland knew that language well, he threw himself into the study of it with great energy, and became a very good scholar. Having read a Latin life of Alexander, some one asked him what he thought of that conqueror.

"I think," said he, "that I should like to resemble him." "But," said his tutor, "Alexander lived only thirty-two years."

"Ah,” replied the prince; " and is not that enough when one has conquered kingdoms?"

When his father heard of this reply, he said:

"Here is a boy who will make a better king than I am, and who will go farther even than Gustavus the Great.”

One day he stood looking at a map of a province of Hungary which had recently been wrested from the Emperor of Austria

by the Turks. At the bottom of this map some satirical person had written in French the well-known words of Job:

"The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away blessed be the name of the Lord."

Now, this was a pretty good joke in French, because the French word for Lord is Seigneur, and it was common at that time to call the Sultan of Turkey the "Grand Seigneur." Next to this map hung one of Livonia, a province conquered by Sweden a hundred years before. before. At the bottom of this map the young prince wrote:

"God gave it me; the Devil shall not get it away."

After the death of his father, concealing whatever resentment he may have felt at being left under the tutelage of a grandmother, he passed all his time in hunting, in martial exercises, and in reviewing the troops. One day, when his father had been dead six months, and he was not quite sixteen years of age, he was observed to ride home from a grand review in a very thoughtful mood, and one of his nobles asked him what was the subject of his revery.

"I am thinking,” replied the boy-king, "that I feel myself worthy to command those brave soldiers, and that I do not like that either they or I should receive orders from a woman.'

The courtier to whom this was said jumped at the opportunity to make his fortune. He urged the king to terminate his minority, and offered his services in making the arrangements necessary. The king consenting, it was not difficult to gain over the ministers, the nobles, and the officers of the army. Without bloodshed or any kind of disturbance the revolution was accomplished, and in three days after the forming of the plan the regent was consigned to private life, and Charles XII. was the reigning King of Sweden. At the ceremony of the coronation, a few weeks after, just as the archbishop was about to place the crown upon the royal head, Charles took it out of his hands, and placed it himself upon his head. The adroit courtier who had aided him in getting the crown he ennobled and made him his prime minister.

No one, it appears, expected much of this youthful monarch. He had no vices, it is true; he neither drank, nor gormandized.

nor gambled. A Spartan soldier was not more temperate, nor more hardy, nor more chaste than he. But he was haughty, reserved, and obstinate, and seemed to care for nothing but hunting and the drilling of his troops. The ambassadors residing at his court wrote home to their masters that this new king was stupid, and was not likely ever to be formidable to his neighbors. His own subjects, seeing that he did nothing but hunt and attend parades, considered him inferior to his ancestors.

Old Dr. Franklin used to say that if a man makes a sheep of himself, the wolves will eat him. Not less true is it, that if a man is generally supposed to be a sheep, wolves will be very likely to try and eat him.

Three kings, neighbors and allies of Charles, hearing on all hands that the young king was a fool, and knowing that he was only a boy in years, concluded that it would be an excellent time to satisfy some ancient grudges against Sweden, and to wrest a few provinces from its territory. The King of Denmark was one of these good neighbors and allies; another was the King of Poland; the third and most powerful was Peter the Great, Czar of all the Russias. Under various pretexts, these three kings were manning ships or raising troops for the same object, the spoliation of the heritage of Sweden's youthful king.

Sweden was alarmed. Her old generals were dead, her armies were unused to war, and her king was thought to be a boy, ignorant, self-willed, and incapable. The council met to consider the situation, the king presiding. The aged councillors advised that efforts should be made to divert or postpone the storm by negotiation. When the old men had spoken, the king rose and said :

"Gentlemen, I have resolved never to make an unjust war, but never to finish a just one except by the destruction of my enemies. My resolution is taken. The first who declares himself, I shall go and attack, and when I have conquered him, I hope to make the others a little afraid of me."

There was something in the manner of the king which in

spired confidence, and the councillors departed to enter with spirit into the preparations of war. The kingdom was instantly put upon a war footing. The king laid aside his gay costumes and wore only the uniform of a Swedish general. The luxuries of the table were banished from his abode, and he partook only of soldier's fare. Submitting himself to the strictest discipline, he imposed the same upon his troops, and soon he had an army of soldiers in the highest state of efficiency. It is said that from this time to the end of his life he never tasted wine, nor indulged in any kind of vicious pleasure whatever. He was a soldier, and nothing but a soldier.

Two years passed after the first alarm before the storm burst. The year 1700 came in, which was the eighteenth year of the life of Charles XII. As he was out bear-hunting one day in the spring of that year, the news was brought to him that Denmark had begun the war by invading his province of Livonia.

He was ready. Having previously provided for that anticipated invasion, he hurried an army on board a fleet, and struck at once for the heart of Denmark, Copenhagen. Not many days elapsed after the interruption of his bear-hunt, before he had a fleet blockading the port of Copenhagen, and an army thundering at its gates.

"What is that whistling noise I hear overhead?" asked the king, as he was disembarking on the Danish shore.

'It is the musket-balls, sire," said an officer.

"Good!" said the king; "that shall be my music henceforth."

Such were the rapidity and success of the king, that in six weeks after landing on Danish soil the war was ended, and a treaty concluded which conceded to the King of Sweden everything he asked.

Meanwhile, the King of Poland was besieging Riga (which was then a Swedish city), and the czar was leading a host of a hundred thousand undisciplined barbarians against the young conqueror. Charles left the defence of Riga to a valiant old Swedish general, who succeeded in holding it, and marched himself to meet the czar with twenty thousand troops. Never was victory more sudden, more easy, or more complete than that

which these twenty thousand Swedes won over the great mob of Russians led by Peter. The czar escaped with but forty thousand men.

From that defeat the military greatness of Russia was born.

"I know well," said the czar, as he was in retreat, "that these Swedes will beat us for a long time; but, at last, they will teach us how to conquer."

And so it proved; for, from that day, Peter began the mighty work of drilling his half-savage hordes into soldiers, — a work which is still going on, though great progress has been made in it. The Russian people attributed their defeat to sorcery and witchcraft, and we have still the prayer which was addressed to St. Nicholas on this occasion in all their churches. It was as follows:

"O thou who art our perpetual consoler in all our adversities, great Saint Nicholas, infinitely powerful - by what sin have we offended thee in our sacrifices, our homage, our salutations, our penances, that thou hast abandoned us? We implore thy assistance against these terrible, insolent, enraged, frightful, unconquerable destroyers; and yet, like lions and bears robbed of their young, they have attacked, terrified, wounded, killed by thousands, us who are thy people. As this could not have happened except by enchantment and sorcery, we pray thee, O great St. Nicholas, to be our champion and our standard-bearer, to deliver us from this crowd of sorcerers, and to drive them from our frontiers with the recompense due to them."

Charles had no sooner scattered the Russian hosts than he turned his attention to Poland. Partly by artifice and partly by victories, he, at length, dethroned the King of Poland, and caused to be elected in his stead Stanislas, a young gentleman to whom he had chanced to take a fancy. These things, however, were not done in a campaign. From the time of his leaving Sweden, in May, 1700, to the complete subjection of Poland, was a period of seven years; during which Charles and his men lived upon the country and saved vast sums of money. If Charles had then gone home, as his generals advised and