If stronger testimony to the military genius of the Old Dessauer were wanted from the mouth of his own contemporaries, it might easily be quoted from the despatches of Prince Eugène. That great general freely admits that the Prince’s troops surpassed his own in courage and discipline; nay, he adds, “the Prince of Dessau has done wonders in the battle of Turin.” The Emperor of Austria endorsed this judgment, and added, “that he had earned immortal glory,” and he conferred on him the title of Serene Highness. So much for the eighteenth century. If now we look back to the seventeenth, the century of the Thirty Years’ War, we find Anhalt the constant trysting-ground of the two parties, the Catholic and the Protestant Powers, and we see the princes of Anhalt again and again at the head of the Northern or Protestant armies. The Elbe often divided the two, and the bridge over the river near Dessau was contested then as it was during the Napoleonic wars. Well do I remember, when as a boy I went to the Schanzenhaus, a coffeehouse on the way to the new bridge over the Elbe, how it was explained to me that these Schanzen or fortifications were what was left of the works erected by Wallenstein: just as I learnt at a later time that my own house at Oxford called _Park’s End_, was so called not because it stood as it does now at the end of the Park, but because what is now called the Park was originally the Parks, _i.e._, the parks of artillery erected by Cromwell’s army against the walls of Oxford. The right name of my house should therefore have been not Park’s End, but Parks’ End. A more merciless war than the Thirty Years’ War was seldom waged; villages and whole towns vanished from the ground, and many tracts of cultivated land, particularly along the Elbe, were changed into deserts. Yet during all that time the Anhalt princes never wavered. When the Elector of the Palatinate, Frederick II., had been proclaimed King in Bohemia in 1619, his commander-in-chief was Prince Christian of Anhalt. When after years of slaughter Gustavus Adolphus came to the assistance of the Protestant Powers in Germany and won the decisive battle of Lützen, one of Prince Christian’s sons, Prince Ernest, fought at his side and died of his wounds soon after the battle. The memory of Gustavus Adolphus has been kept alive in Dessau to the present day. He has become the hero of popular romance, and as a schoolboy I heard several stories told by the common people of his adventures during the war. There stands a large red brick house which I often passed on my way from Dessau to Wörlitz, and which is simply called Gustavus Adolphus. The story goes that the Swedish king was in hiding there under a bridge while the enemy’s cavalry passed over it.