, in the main features of its political distractions, reflected,
almost as in a representative picture, the condition of many another German
city. At that period, by very ancient ties of reciprocal service, strengthened
by treaties, by religious faith, and by personal attachment to individuals of
the Imperial house, this ancient and sequestered city was inalienably bound to
the interests of the Emperor. Both the city and the university were Catholic.
Princes of the Imperial family, and Papal commissioners, who had secret motives
for not appearing at Vienna, had more than once found a hospitable reception
within the walls. And, amongst many acts of grace by which the Emperors had
acknowledged these services and marks of attachment, one of them had advanced a
very large sum of money to the city chest for an indefinite time; receiving in
return, as the warmest testimony of confidential gratitude which the city could
bestow, that jus liberi ingressus which entitled the Emperor's armies to a free
passage at all times, and, in cases of extremity, to the right of keeping the
city gates and maintaining a garrison in the citadel. Unfortunately, Klosterheim
was not sui juris, or on the roll of free cities of the Empire, but of the
nature of an appanage in the family of the Landgrave of X--; and this
circumstance had produced a double perplexity in the politics of the city; for
the late Landgrave, who had been assassinated in a very mysterious manner upon a
hunting party, benefited to the fullest extent both by the political and
religious bias of the city - being a personal friend of the Emperor's, a
Catholic, amiable in his deportment, and generally beloved by his subjects. But
the Prince who had succeeded him in the Landgraviate as the next heir was
everywhere odious for the harshness of his government, no less than for the
gloomy austerity of his character; and to Klosterheim, in particular, which had
been pronounced by some of the first jurisprudents a female appanage, he
presented himself under the additional disadvantages of a very suspicious title
and a Swedish bias too notorious to be disguised. At a time when the religious
and political attachments of Europe were brought into collisions so strange that
the foremost auxiliary of the Protestant interest in Germany was really the most
distinguished Cardinal in the Church of Rome, it did not appear inconsistent
with this strong leaning to the King of Sweden that the Landgrave was privately
known to be a Catholic bigot, who practised the severest penances, and, tyrant
as he showed himself to all others, grovelled himself as an abject devotee at
the feet of a haughty confessor. Amongst