The Dove in the Eagles Nest | Page 4

the free cities and the savagery of
the independent barons made the former the more suitable region for
the adventures. The time could only be before the taming and bringing
into order of the empire, when the Imperial cities were in their greatest
splendour, the last free nobles in course of being reduced from their
lawless liberty, and the House of Austria beginning to acquire its
preponderance over the other princely families.
M. Freytag's books, and Hegewisch's History of Maximilian, will, I
think, be found fully to bear out the picture I have tried to give of the
state of things in the reign of the Emperor Friedrich III., when, for want
of any other law, Faust recht, or fist right, ruled; i.e. an offended
nobleman, having once sent a Fehde-brief to his adversary, was
thenceforth at liberty to revenge himself by a private war, in which, for
the wrong inflicted, no justice was exacted.
Hegewisch remarks that the only benefit of this custom was, that the
honour of subscribing a feud-brief was so highly esteemed that it
induced the nobles to learn to write! The League of St. George and the
Swabian League were the means of gradually putting down this
authorized condition of deadly feud.
This was in the days of Maximilian's youth. He is a prince who seems
to have been almost as inferior in his foreign to what he was in his
domestic policy as was Queen Elizabeth. He is chiefly familiar to us as
failing to keep up his authority in Flanders after the death of Mary of
Burgundy, as lingering to fulfil his engagement with Anne of Brittany
till he lost her and her duchy, as incurring ridicule by his ill-managed
schemes in Italy, and the vast projects that he was always forming
without either means or steadiness to carry them out, by his perpetual
impecuniosity and slippery dealing; and in his old age he has become

rather the laughing-stock of historians.
But there is much that is melancholy in the sight of a man endowed
with genius, unbalanced by the force of character that secures success,
and with an ardent nature whose intention overleapt obstacles that in
practice he found insuperable. At home Maximilian raised the Imperial
power from a mere cipher to considerable weight. We judge him as if
he had been born in the purple and succeeded to a defined power like
his descendants. We forget that the head of the Holy Roman Empire
had been, ever since the extinction of the Swabian line, a mere mark for
ambitious princes to shoot at, with everything expected from him, and
no means to do anything. Maximilian's own father was an avaricious,
undignified old man, not until near his death Archduke of even all
Austria, and with anarchy prevailing everywhere under his nominal
rule. It was in the time of Maximilian that the Empire became as
compact and united a body as could be hoped of anything so unwieldy,
that law was at least acknowledged, Faust recht for ever abolished, and
the Emperor became once more a real power.
The man under whom all this was effected could have been no fool; yet,
as he said himself, he reigned over a nation of kings, who each chose to
rule for himself; and the uncertainty of supplies of men or money to be
gained from them made him so often fail necessarily in his
engagements, that he acquired a shiftiness and callousness to breaches
of promise, which became the worst flaw in his character. But of the
fascination of his manner there can be no doubt. Even Henry VIII.'s
English ambassadors, when forced to own how little they could depend
on him, and how dangerous it was to let subsidies pass through his
fingers, still show themselves under a sort of enchantment of devotion
to his person, and this in his old age, and when his conduct was most
inexcusable and provoking.
His variety of powers was wonderful. He was learned in many
languages--in all those of his empire or hereditary states, and in many
besides; and he had an ardent love of books, both classical and modern.
He delighted in music, painting, architecture, and many arts of a more
mechanical description; wrote treatises on all these, and on other
subjects, especially gardening and gunnery. He was the inventor of an
improved lock to the arquebus, and first divined how to adapt the
disposition of his troops to the use of the newly- discovered fire-arms.

And in all these things his versatile head and ready hand were
personally employed, not by deputy; while coupled with so much
artistic taste was a violent passion for hunting, which carried him
through many hairbreadth 'scapes. "It was plain," he used to say, "that
God Almighty ruled the world, or