series of splendid balls, hunting parties, carousings.

The Emperor was an invalid, the King was abstemious, but the Elector was
a mighty drinker. It was not his custom nor that of his councillors to go
to bed. They were usually carried there. But it was the wish of Ferdinand
to be conciliatory, and he bore himself as well as he could at the
banquet. The Elector was also a mighty hunter. Neither of his Imperial
guests cared for field sports, but they looked out contentedly from the
window of a hunting-lodge, before which for their entertainment the
Elector and his courtiers slaughtered eight bears, ten stags, ten pigs,
and eleven badgers, besides a goodly number of other game; John George
shooting also three martens from a pole erected for that purpose in the
courtyard. It seemed proper for him thus to exhibit a specimen of the
skill for which he was justly famed. The Elector before his life closed,
so says the chronicle, had killed 28,000 wild boars, 208 bears, 3543
wolves, 200 badgers, 18,967 foxes, besides stags and roedeer in still
greater number, making a grand total of 113,629 beasts. The leader of the
Lutheran party of Germany had not lived in vain.

Thus the great chiefs of Catholicism and of Protestantism amicably
disported themselves in the last days of the year, while their respective
forces were marshalling for mortal combat all over Christendom. The
Elector certainly loved neither Matthias nor Ferdinand, but he hated the
Palatine. The chief of the German Calvinists disputed that Protestant
hegemony which John George claimed by right. Indeed the immense advantage
enjoyed by the Catholics at the outbreak of the religious war from the
mutual animosities between the two great divisions of the Reformed Church
was already terribly manifest. What an additional power would it derive
from the increased weakness of the foe, should there be still other and
deeper and more deadly schisms within one great division itself!