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