gain;--like clouds
positively electric VERSUS clouds negatively. As indeed was getting
to be the case of Germany in general; case fatally visible in every
Province, Principality and Parish there: till a thunder-storm, and
succession of thunder-storms, of Thirty Years' continuance, broke
out. Of which these huge rumors and mutations, and menacings of war,
springing out of that final colloquy and slap in the face, are to
be taken as the THIRD premonitory Symptom. Spaniards and Dutch stand
electrically fronting one another in Cleve for seven years, till their
Truce is out, before they clash together; Germany does not wait so long
by a couple of years.

SYMPTOM FOURTH, AND CATASTROPHE UPON THE HEELS OF IT.

Five years more (1618), and there will have come a FOURTH Symptom,
biggest of all, rapidly consummating the process;--Symptom still famed,
of the following external figure: Three Official Gentlemen descending
from a window in the Castle of Prag: hurled out by impatient Bohemian
Protestantism, a depth of seventy feet,--happily only into dung, and
without loss of life. From which follows a "King of Bohemia" elected
there, King not unknown to us;--"thunder-clouds" all in one huge clash,
and the "continent of sour smoke" blazing all into a continent
of thunderous fire: THIRTY-YEARS WAR, as they now call it! Such a
conflagration as poor Germany never saw before or since.

These were the FOUR preliminary SYMPTOMS of that dismal business. "As to
the primary CAUSES of it," says one of my Authorities, "these lie deep,
deep almost as those of Original Sin. But the proximate causes seem
to me to have been these two: FIRST, That the Jesuit-Priests and
Principalities had vowed and resolved to have, by God's help and by the
Devil's (this was the peculiarity of it), Europe made Orthodox again:
and then SECONDLY, The fact that a Max of Bavaria existed at that time,
whose fiery character, cunning but rash head, and fanatically Papist
heart disposed him to attempt that enterprise, him with such resources
and capacities, under their bad guidance."

Johann Sigismund did many swift decisive strokes of business in his
time, businesses of extensive and important nature; but this of the slap
to Neuburg has stuck best in the idle memory of mankind. Dusseldorf,
Year 1613: it was precisely in the time when that same Friedrioh, not
yet by any means "King of Bohemia," but already Kur-Pfalz (Cousin
of this Neuburg, and head man of the Prote