hort,
they had to bury the dead, and do reason; and Albert hustled himself
well clear of this broil, as he had done of many.

Battle enough, poor man, with steel and other weapons:--and we see
he did it with sharp insight, good forecast; now and then in a wildly
leonine or AQUILINE manner. A tall hook-nosed man, of lean, sharp,
rather taciturn aspect; nose and look are very aquiline; and there is
a cloudy sorrow in those old eyes, which seems capable of sudden
effulgence to a dangerous extent. He was a considerable, diplomatist
too: very great with the Kaiser, Old Friedrich III. (Max's father,
Charles V.'s Great-Grandfather); [How admirable Albert is, not to say
"almost divine," to the Kaiser's then Secretary, oily-mouthed AEneas
Sylvius, afterwards Pope, Rentsch can testify (pp. 401, 586);
quoting AEneas's eulogies and gossipries (_Historia Rerum Frederici
Imperatoris,_ I conclude, though no book is named). Oily diligent
AEneas, in his own young years and in Albert's prime, had of course seen
much of this "miracle" of Arms and Art,--"miracle" and "almost divine,"
so to speak.] and managed many things for him. Managed to get the
thrice-lovely Heiress of the Netherlands and Burgundy, Daughter of that
Charles the Rash, with her Seventeen Provinces, for Max, [1477]--who was
thought thereupon by everybody to be the luckiest man alive; though the
issue contradicted it before long.

Kurfurst Albert died in 1486, March 11, aged seventy-two. It was some
months after Bosworth Fight, where our Crooked Richard got his quietus
here in England and brought the Wars of the Roses to their finale:--a
little chubby Boy, the son of poor parents at Eisleben in Saxony, Martin
Luther the name of him, was looking into this abtruse Universe, with
those strange eyes of his, in what rough woollen or linsey-woolsey
short-clothes we do not know. [Born 10th November, 1483]

Albert's funeral was very grand; the Kaiser himself, and all the
Magnates of the Diet and Reich attending him from Frankfurt to his
last resting-place, many miles of road. For he died at the Diet, in
Frankfurt-on-Mayn; having fallen ill there while busy,--perhaps too busy
for that age, in the harsh spring weather,--electing Prince Maximilian
("lucky Max,") who will be Kaiser too before long, and is already deep
in ILL-luck, tragical and other to be King of the Romans. The old Kaiser
had "looked in on him at Onolzbach" (Anspach), and brought him along;
such a man could not be