All the efforts of Louis XI., his winning speeches, and his ruinous deeds, did not succeed in averting the serious check he dreaded. On the 18th of August, 1477, seven months after the battle of Nancy and the death of Charles the Rash, Arch-duke Maximilian, son of the Emperor Frederick III., arrived at Ghent to wed Mary of Burgundy. “The moment he caught sight of his betrothed,” say the Flemish chroniclers, “they both bent down to the ground and turned as pale as death--a sign of mutual love according to some, an omen of unhappiness according to others.” Next day, August 19, the marriage was celebrated with great simplicity in the chapel of the Hotel de Ville; and Maximilian swore to respect the privileges of Ghent. A few days afterwards he renewed the same oath at Bruges, in the midst of decorations bearing the modest device, “Most glorious prince, defend us lest we perish” (Gloriosissime princeps, defende nos ne pereamus). Not only did Louis XI. thus fail in his first wise design of incorporating with France, by means of a marriage between his son the _dauphin_ and Princess Mary, the heritage of the Dukes of Burgundy, but he suffered the heiress and a great part of the heritage to pass into the hands of the son of the German emperor; and thereby he paved the way for that determined rivalry between the houses of France and Austria, which was a source of so many dangers and woes to both states during three centuries. It is said that in 1745, when Louis XV., after the battle of Fontenoy, entered Bruges cathedral, he remarked, as he gazed on the tombs of the Austro-Burgundian princes, “There is the origin of all our wars.” In vain, when the marriage of Maximilian and Mary was completed, did Louis XI. attempt to struggle against his new and dangerous neighbor; his campaigns in the Flemish provinces, in 1478 and 1479, had no great result; he lost, on the 7th of August, 1479, the battle of Guinegate, between St. Omer and Therouanne; and before long, tired of war, which was not his favorite theatre for the display of his abilities, he ended by concluding with Maximilian a truce at first, and then a peace, which in spite of some conditionals favorable to France, left the principal and the fatal consequences of the Austro-Burgundian marriage to take full effect. This event marked the stoppage of that great, national policy which had prevailed during the first part of Louis XI.’s reign. Joan of Arc and Charles VII. had driven the English from France; and for sixteen years Louis XI. had, by fighting and gradually destroying the great vassals who made alliance with them, prevented them from regaining a footing there. That was work as salutary as it was glorious for the nation and the French kingship. At the death of Charles the Rash, the work was accomplished; Louis XI. was the only power left in France, without any great peril from without, and without any great rival within; but he then fell under the sway of mistaken ideas and a vicious