Ferdinand and Maximilian had sought counsel of the dying Tilly. Tilly had given them counsel bitter but inevitable. Dissembling their hate and fear they called like trembling necromancers when they invoke the fiend upon the name of power. The name of Wallenstein gave new life to the Imperial cause under the very ribs of death. At once he stood between the Empire and destruction with an army of 50,000 men, conjured, as it were, out of the earth by the spell of his influence alone. All whose trade was war came at the call of the grand master of their trade. The secret of Wallenstein's ambition is buried in his grave, but the man himself was the prince of adventurers, the ideal chief of mercenary bands, the arch contractor for the hireling's blood. His character was formed in a vast political gambling house, a world given up to pillage and the strong hand, an Eldorado of confiscations. Of the lofty dreamer portrayed in the noble dramatic poem of Schiller, there is little trace in the intensely practical character of the man. A scion of a good Bohemian house, poor himself, but married to a rich wife, whose wealth was the first step in the ladder of his marvellous fortunes, Wallenstein had amassed immense domains by the purchase of confiscated estates, a traffic redeemed from meanness only by the vastness of the scale on which he practised it, and the loftiness of the aim which he had in view. Then he took to raising and commanding mercenary troops, improving on his predecessors in that trade by doubling the size of his army, on the theory, coolly avowed by him, that a large army would subsist by its command of the country, where a small army would starve. But all was subservient to his towering ambition, and to a pride which has been called theatrical, and which often wore an eccentric garb, but which his death scene proves to have been the native grand infirmity of the man. He walked in dark ways and was unscrupulous and ruthless when on the path of his ambition; but none can doubt the self sustaining force of his lonely intellect, his power of command, the spell which his character cast over the fierce and restless spirits of his age. Prince- Duke of Friedland, Mecklenburgh, and Sagan, Generalissimo of the armies of the House of Austria,--to this height had the landless and obscure adventurer risen, in envy's despite, as his motto proudly said, not by the arts of a courtier or a demagogue, but by strength of brain and heart, in a contest with rivals whose brains and hearts were strong. Highest he stood among the uncrowned heads of Europe, and dreaded by the crowned. We wonder how the boisterous soldiers can have loved a chief who was so far from being a comrade, a being so disdainful and reserved, who at the sumptuous table kept by his officers never appeared, never joined in the revelry, even in the camp lived alone, punished intrusion on his haughty privacy as a crime. But his name was victory and plunder;