mad world with a lunatic to govern it; a
democracy of many princes, little and big, fighting amongst each other,
and falling into daily changing combinations as some masterly or
mischievous hand whirled the kaleidoscope; drinking Rhenish by hogsheads,
and beer by the tun; robbing churches, dictating creeds to their
subjects, and breaking all the commandments themselves; a people at the
bottom dimly striving towards religious freedom and political life out of
abject social, ecclesiastical, and political serfdom, and perhaps even
then dumbly feeling within its veins, with that prophetic instinct which
never abandons great races, a far distant and magnificent Future of
national unity and Imperial splendour, the very reverse of the confusion
which was then the hideous Present; an Imperial family at top with many
heads and slender brains; a band of brothers and cousins wrangling,
intriguing, tripping up each others' heels, and unlucky Rudolph, in his
Hradschin, looking out of window over the peerless Prague, spread out in
its beauteous landscape of hill and dale, darkling forest, dizzy cliffs,
and rushing river, at his feet, feebly cursing the unhappy city for its
ingratitude to an invisible and impotent sovereign; his excellent brother
Matthias meanwhile marauding through the realms and taking one crown
after another from his poor bald head.

It would be difficult to depict anything more precisely what an emperor
in those portentous times should not be. He collected works of art of
many kinds--pictures, statues, gems. He passed his days in his galleries
contemplating in solitary grandeur these treasures, or in his stables,
admiring a numerous stud of horses which he never drove or rode.
Ambassadors and ministers of state disguised themselves as grooms and
stable-boys to obtain accidental glimpses of a sovereign who rarely
granted audiences. His nights were passed in star-gazing with Tycho de
Brake, or with that illustrious Suabian whose name is one of the great
lights and treasures of the world. But it was not to study the laws of
planetary motion nor to fathom mysteries of divine harmony that the
monarch stood with Kepler in the observatory. The influence of countless
worlds upon the destiny of one who, by capricious accident, if accident
ever exists in history, had been entrusted with the destiny of so large a
portion of one little world; the horoscope, not of the Universe, but of
himself; such were the limited purposes w