Moderation is what religion enjoins, what neighbouring Churches expect
from you, and what we recommend to you." The Sixty and their associates
would probably have been glad to reply in language resembling that
which, as some of them could well remember, had been held by the clergy
to Charles the Second during his residence in Scotland. But they had
just been informed that there was in England a strong feeling in favour
of the rabbled curates, and that it would, at such a conjuncture, be
madness in the body which represented the Presbyterian Church to quarrel
with the King, [791] The Assembly therefore returned a grateful and
respectful answer to the royal letter, and assured His Majesty that they
had suffered too much from oppression ever to be oppressors, [792]

Meanwhile the troops all over the Continent were going into winter
quarters. The campaign had everywhere been indecisive. The victory
gained by Luxemburg at Fleurus had produced no important effect. On the
Upper Rhine great armies had eyed each other, month after month, without
exchanging a blow. In Catalonia a few small forts had been taken. In
the cast of Europe the Turks had been successful on some points, the
Christians on other points; and the termination of the contest seemed to
be as remote as ever. The coalition had in the course of the year lost
one valuable member and gained another. The Duke of Lorraine, the ablest
captain in the Imperial service, was no more. He had died, as he had
lived, an exile and a wanderer, and had bequeathed to his children
nothing but his name and his rights. It was popularly said that the
confederacy could better have spared thirty thousand soldiers than such
a general. But scarcely had the allied Courts gone into mourning for him
when they were consoled by learning that another prince, superior to him
in power, and not inferior to him in capacity or courage, had joined the
league against France.

This was Victor Amadeus Duke of Savoy. He was a young man; but he was
already versed in those arts for which the statesmen of Italy had,
ever since the thirteenth century, been celebrated, those arts by which
Castruccio Castracani and Francis Sforza rose to greatness, and which
Machiavel reduced to a system. No sovereign in modern Europe has, with
so small a principality, exercised so great an influence during so long
a period. He had for a time submitted, with a show of cheerfulness, but
with secret reluctance and resentment, to