turned towards the place where the august assembly was holding its
protracted session. Certainly, if wisdom were to be found in mitred
heads--if the power to heal angry passions and to settle the conflicting
claims of prerogative and conscience were to be looked for among men of
lofty station, then the Cologne conferences ought to have made the rough
places smooth and the crooked paths straight throughout all Christendom.
There was the Archbishop of Rossano, afterwards Pope Urban VII, as
plenipotentiary from Rome; there was Charles of Aragon, Duke of
Terranova, supported by five councillors, as ambassador from his Catholic
Majesty; there were the Duke of Aerschot, the Abbot of Saint Gertrude,
the Abbot of Marolles, Doctor Bucho Aytta, Caspar Schetz, Lord of
Grobbendonck, that learned Frisian, Aggeus van Albada, with seven other
wise men, as envoys from the states-general: There were their Serene
Highnesses the Elector and Archbishops of Cologne and Treves, with the
Bishop of Wurtzburg. There was also a numerous embassy from his Imperial
Majesty, with Count Otto de Schwartzenburg at its head.

Here then were holiness, serenity, dignity, law, and learning in
abundance. Here was a pope 'in posse', with archbishops, princes, dukes,
jurisconsults, and doctors of divinity 'in esse', sufficient to remodel
a world, if worlds were to be remodelled by such instruments. If
protocols, replications, annotations, apostilles, could heal a bleeding
country, here were the physicians to furnish those drugs in unlimited
profusion. If reams of paper, scrawled over with barbarous
technicalities, could smother and bury a quarrel which had its origin in
the mutual antagonism of human elements, here were the men to scribble
unflinchingly, till the reams were piled to a pyramid. If the same idea
presented in many aspects could acquire additional life, here were the
word-mongers who, could clothe one shivering thought in a hundred
thousand garments, till it attained all the majesty which decoration