er as you
can--Prussia, Poland, or what else. I should much like, for instance,
just now, to hear of any honest Cornish gentleman of the old Drake breed
taking a fancy to land in Spain, and trying what he could make of his
rights as far round Gibraltar as he could enforce them. At all events,
Master Joachim has somehow got hold of Prussia; and means to keep it.

IX. Johann Sigismund. Only notable for our economical purposes, as
getting the "guardianship" of Prussia confirmed to him. The story at
page 317 (226), "a strong flame of choler," indicates a new order of
things among the knights of Europe--"princely etiquettes melting all
into smoke." Too literally so, that being one of the calamitous
functions of the plain lives we are living, and of the busy life our
country is living. In the Duchy of Cleve, especially, concerning which
legal dispute begins in Sigismund's time. And it is well worth the
lawyers' trouble, it seems.

It amounted, perhaps, to two Yorkshires in extent. A
naturally opulent country of fertile meadows, shipping
capabilities, metalliferous hills, and at this time, in
consequence of the Dutch-Spanish war, and the multitude of
Protestant refugees, it was getting filled with ingenious
industries, and rising to be what it still is, the busiest
quarter of Germany. A country lowing with kine; the hum of
the flax-spindle heard in its cottages in those old
days--"much of the linen called Hollands is made in Juelich,
and only bleached, stamped, and sold by the Dutch," says
Buesching. A country in our days which is shrouded at short
intervals with the due canopy of coal-smoke, and loud with
sounds of the anvil and the loom.

The lawyers took two hundred and six years to settle the question
concerning this Duchy, and the thing Johann Sigismund had claimed
legally in 1609 was actually handed over to Johann Sigismund's
descendant in the seventh generation. "These litigated duchies are now
the Prussian provinces, Juelich, Berg, Cleve, and the nucleus of
Prussia's possessions in the Rhine country."

X. George Wilhelm. Read pp. 325 to 327 (231, 233) on this Elector and
German Protestantism, now fallen cold, and somewhat too little
dangerous. But George Wilhelm is the only weak prince of all the twelve.
For another example how the heart and life of a country depend upon its
prince, not on its council, read this, of Gustavus Adolphus, demanding