oppose his progress, he had to contend against a still more implacable
enemy in the heart of every Bavarian--religious fanaticism. Soldiers
who did not believe in the Pope were, in this country, a new and
unheard-of phenomenon; the blind zeal of the priests represented them to
the peasantry as monsters, the children of hell, and their leader as
Antichrist. No wonder, then, if they thought themselves released from
all the ties of nature and humanity towards this brood of Satan, and
justified in committing the most savage atrocities upon them. Woe to
the Swedish soldier who fell into their hands! All the torments which
inventive malice could devise were exercised upon these unhappy victims;
and the sight of their mangled bodies exasperated the army to a fearful
retaliation. Gustavus Adolphus, alone, sullied the lustre of his heroic
character by no act of revenge; and the aversion which the Bavarians
felt towards his religion, far from making him depart from the
obligations of humanity towards that unfortunate people, seemed to
impose upon him the stricter duty to honour his religion by a more
constant clemency.

The approach of the king spread terror and consternation in the capital,
which, stripped of its defenders, and abandoned by its principal
inhabitants, placed all its hopes in the magnanimity of the conqueror.
By an unconditional and voluntary surrender, it hoped to disarm his
vengeance; and sent deputies even to Freysingen to lay at his feet the
keys of the city. Strongly as the king might have been tempted by the
inhumanity of the Bavarians, and the hostility of their sovereign, to
make a dreadful use of the rights of victory; pressed as he was by
Germans to avenge the fate of Magdeburg on the capital of its destroyer,
this great prince scorned this mean revenge; and the very helplessness
of his enemies disarmed his severity. Contented with the more noble
triumph of conducting the Palatine Frederick with the pomp of a victor