Elsass, were deeds of open violence rather than of bad faith. Through the whole of his dealings with Austria and Switzerland there runs a vein of conscious sincerity, a feeling that his own straightforwardness was not met with equal straightforwardness on the part of those with whom he had to deal.

Where then Charles failed was that he had neither the moral nor the intellectual qualities which alone could have enabled him to carry out the great schemes which he was ever planning. Success has often been the lot of brave, frank, and open-hearted princes, who have carried everything before them, and who have won hearts as well as cities by storm. Sometimes again it has fallen to the lot of a cold, crafty, secret plotter, like Charles' own rival and opposite. The gallant, genial René of Lorraine won the love of subjects and allies, and recovered the dominions which Charles had stolen from him. Lewis, from his den at Plessis, established his power over all France; he extended the bounds of France by two great provinces, and permanently attached the stout pikes and halberts of Switzerland to his interest. But Charles the Bold, always planning schemes which needed the genius and opportunities of Charles the Great, was doomed to failure in the nature of things. A prince, just, it may be, and truthful, but harsh and pitiless, who never made a friend public or private, whose very virtues were more repulsive than other men's vices, who displayed no single sign of deep or enlarged policy, but whose whole career was one simple embodiment of military force in its least amiable form, such a prince was not the man to found an empire; he was the very man to lose the dominions which he had himself inherited and conquered.

And now we turn from the character of the man to the events in which he was the actor or the instrument. The history of Charles is a history of the highest and most varied interest. The tale, as a mere tale, as a narrative of personal adventure and a display of personal character, is one of the most attractive in European history. As such it has been chosen by Scott as the material for two of his novels, one of which, if not absolutely one of his masterpieces, at any rate ranks high among his writings. It is probably from “Quentin Durward" that most English readers have drawn their ideas of Lewis the Eleventh and of Charles the Bold; some may even have drawn their main ideas of the fights of Granson, Morat,

and Nancy from the hurried narrative in "Anne of Geierstein." In fact, a nobler subject, whether for romance or poetry or tragedy, can hardly be conceived than the exaltation and the fall of the renowned Burgundian Duke.

But to the historian the fate of Charles and his duchy has an interest which is far higher and wider than this. Chronologically and geographically alike, Charles and his duchy form the great barrier, or the great connecting link, whichever we choose to call it, between the main divisions of European history and European geography. The dukes of Burgundy of the house of Valois form a sort of bridge between the latter Middle Age and the period of the Renaissance and the Reformation. They connect those two periods by forming the kernel of the vast dominion of that Austrian house to which their inheritance fell, and which, mainly by virtue of that inheritance, fills such a space in the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the dominions of the Burgundian dukes hold a still higher historical position. They may be said to bind together the whole of European history for the last thousand years. From the ninth century to the nineteenth, the politics of Europe have largely gathered round the rivalry between the Eastern and the Western kingdoms — in modern language, between Germany and France. From the ninth century to the nineteenth, a succession of efforts have been made to establish, in one shape or another, a middle state between the two. Over and over again during that long period have men striven to make the whole or some portion of the frontier lands stretching from the mouth of the Rhine to the mouth of the Rhone into an independent barrier state. The first expression of the idea is to be seen in the kingdom of Lothar, the grandson of Charles the Great, a kingdom of which Provence and the Netherlands were alike portions. The neutralizations, or attempted neutralizations, of Switzerland, Savoy, Belgium, and Lüzelburg, have been the feebler contributions of the nineteenth century to the same work. Meanwhile various kingdoms and duchies of Burgundy and Lorraine have risen and fallen, all of them, knowingly or unknowingly, aiming at the same European object. That object was never more distinctly aimed at, and it never seemed nearer to its accomplishment, than when Charles the Bold actually reigned from the Zuyder Zee to the lake of Neufchâtel, and was not without hopes of extending his frontier to the gulf of Lyons.

To understand his position, to understand the position o the lands over which he ruled, it is not needful to go back to any of the uses of the Burgundian name earlier than the division of the Empire in 888. The old Lotharingia of forty years earlier, the narrow strip reaching from the German Ocean to the Mediterranean, had then ceased to exist as a separate state. Its northern portion had become the later Lotharingia, that border land between the Eastern and Western kingdoms, which for a hundred years formed an endless subject of dispute between them. Its southern portion had become what our Old-English Chroniclers emphatically call the “middelrice" the Middle kingdom, the state placed between France, Germany, and Italy. This is that Burgundy, sometimes forming one kingdom, sometimes two, which was at last annexed to the Empire, and of which Arles was the capital, where those Emperors who chose to go through a somewhat empty ceremony took the crown of their Burgundian kingdom. This kingdom took in the County Palatine of Burgundy, better known as Franche Comté, which, till the days of Lewis the Fourteenth, remained a fief of the Empire. It did not take in the duchy of Burgundy, the duchy of which Dijon was the capital, which was always a fief of the crown of France. Now there can be no doubt that Charles, Duke of the French Duchy, Count of the Imperial Palatinate, Duke, by inheritance, of the Lower Lorraine (or Brabant), Duke, by conquest, of the Upper Lorraine, had always before his eyes the memory of these earlier Burgundian and Lotharingian kingdoms. Holding, as he did, parts of old Lotharingia and parts of old Burgundy, there can be no doubt that he aimed at the reestablishment of a great Middle kingdom, which should take in all that had ever been Burgundian or Lotharingian ground. He aimed in short, as others have aimed before and since, at the formation of a state which should hold a central position between France, Germany, and Italy a state which should discharge, with infinitely greater strength, all the duties which our own age has endeavored to throw on Switzerland, Belgium, and Savoy.

This twofold position of Charles, as at once a French and a German prince, forms the key to his history. When he had turned away his thoughts from his schemes of preeminence within the French kingdom, the creation of such a middle state as we have spoken of was a natural form for his ambition to

take. His schemes of this kind form the great subject of the second of the two great divisions of his history. The second division then is undoubtedly the more important, but the former is by far the better known. It has the great advantage of being recorded by one of the few medieval writers-if Philip of Comines is to count as a medieval writer- who are famili to many who are not specially given to mediæval studies. It is a plain straightforward tale, about which there is little difficulty or controversy, and it is so constantly connected with the history of our own country as to have special attractions for the English student. The German career of Charles holds a very different position. One or two facts in it, at least the names of one or two great battles, are familiar to the whole world. Every one can point the moral how the rash and proud Duke was overthrown by the despised Switzer at Granson, at Morat, and at Nancy. But the real character and causes of the war are, for the most part, completely unknown or utterly misrepresented.

Each of the two positions which were held by Charles assumes special importance in one of the two great divisions of his career. He succeeded to the ducal crown in 1467; but his practical reign may be dated from a point at least two years earlier, when the old age and sickness of Philip threw the chief management of affairs into his hands. What we have called his French career lasts from this point till 1472. In these years, both before and after the death of his father, he appears mainly as a French prince. His main policy is to maintain and increase that predominance in French politics which had been gained by his father. During this period, with the single exception of his wars with Lüttich, his field of action lies almost wholly within the kingdom of France; and Lüttich, though it lay within the Empire, had at this time a closer practical connection with France than with Germany. Charles' chief French dominions were the duchy of Burgundy and the counties of Artois and Flanders, the last being strictly a French fief, though circumstances have always tended to unite that province, together with some of its neighbors, into a system of their own, distinct alike from France and from Germany. There was also that fluctuating territory in Picardy, the towns on the Somme, so often pledged, recovered, ceded, and conquered within the space of so few years. These possessions made Charles the most powerful of French princes, to say nothing of the fiefs beyond the kingdom which helped to make him

well-nigh the most powerful of European princes. As a French prince, he joined with other French princes to put limits on the power of the crown, and to divide the kingdom into great feudal holdings, as nearly independent as might be of the common overlord. As a French prince, he played his part in the War of the Public Weal, and insisted, as a main object of his policy, on the establishment of the King's brother as an all but independent Duke of Normandy. The object of Lewis was to make France a compact monarchy; the object of Charles and his fellows was to keep France as nearly as might be in the same state as Germany. But, when the other French princes had been gradually conquered, won over, or got rid of in some way or other, by the crafty policy of Lewis, Charles remained no longer the chief of a coalition of French princes, but the personal rival, the deadly enemy, of the French King.

ent.

In the second part of his life his objects were wholly differHis looks were now turned eastward and southward, or, if they were turned westward, it was with quite different aims from those with which he went forth to fight at Montlhéry. His object now was, not to gain a paramount influence within the kingdom of France, not to weaken the French monarchy, in the character of one of its vassals, but to throw it into the shade, to dismember, perhaps to conquer it, in the character of a foreign sovereign. For this end probably, more than for any other, Charles sought to be King of the Romans, King of Burgundy, King of England. For this end he strove to gather together province after province, so as to form his scattered territories into a kingdom greater than that of France, a kingdom external and antagonistic to France. As he had found that the French monarchy was too strong for him in his character of a French vassal, he would no longer be a Frenchman at all. To curb and weaken the now hostile and foreign realm, he would form a state which should altogether hem it in from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. That is to say, he would call again into being that Middle kingdom, call it Burgundy or Lorraine as we will, which he had a better chance of calling into being than any man before or since.

And undoubtedly it would have been for the permanent interest of Europe if he had succeeded in his attempt. It would be one of the greatest of political blessings if a Duke or King of Burgundy or Lorraine could suddenly appear now [1864]. A strong independent power standing in the gap between France and Germany would release the world from