because of its adherence to the house of Austria, when assailed
by a descendant of the then insignificant Elector of Brandenburg. Yet
the prophet would have been right, for Saxony suffered so much from her
connection with the Austrians in Frederick the Great's time that she
never recovered therefrom; and in the late contest she was lost before a
shot was fired, and her troops, after fighting valiantly in Bohemia,
shared the disasters of the power upon which she had relied for
protection. Bavaria was another German country that seemed more likely
to rise to greatness than Brandenburg; but, though her progress has been
respectable, it must be pronounced insignificant if compared with that
of Prussia. The house of Wittelsbach was great before that of
Hohenzollern had risen to general fame; but the latter has passed it, as
if Fortune had taken the Hohenzollerns under its special protection, and
we should not be in the least surprised were they to take all its
territory ere the twentieth century shall have fairly dawned upon the
world.

The first of the great Prussian rulers was the Elector Frederick
William, who reigned from 1640 to 1688, and who is known as the Great
Elector,--a title of which he was every way worthy, and not the less
that there was just a suspicion of the tyrant in his composition. He had
not a little of that "justness of insight, toughness of character, and
general strength of bridle-hand," which Mr. Carlyle attributes to
Rudolph of Hapsburg. He was a man of the times, and a man for the times.
He came to the throne just as the Thirty Years' War was well advanced in
its last decade, and he had a ruined country for his inheritance; but he
raised that country to a high place in Europe, and was connected with
many of the principal events of the age of Louis XIV. He freed Prussia
from her connection with Poland. He created that Prussian army which has
done such wonderful things in the greatest of wars in the last two
centuries. He it was who won the battle of Fehrbellin, June 18, 1675, at
the expense of the Swedes, who were still living on the mighty
reputation won under Gustavus Adolphus, almost half a century earlier,
and maintained by the splendid soldiers trained in his school. The calm
and philosophic Ranke warms into something like eloquence when summing
up the work of the Great Elector. "Frederick William," he says, "cannot
be placed in the same category with those few great men who have
discovered ne