To tell the life-story of an idealist seems to be repugnant to the most modern of historical methods. Hard dry facts must be summoned to describe his career; an array of political exploits and the wearisome details of fruitless legal reforms must be poured forth in profitless and unending monotony. The soul and its impulses, human or divine, seem no longer to be admitted to the chamber of the historian, whose dull and regulated pulse scorns to beat faster at the tragedy of human lives. But if there is one case in which a true account must not be limited to {3} mere facts, it is that of Maximilian. The specious system of accumulating details, coldly balancing them, and leaving the reader to judge, would be utterly unfair in his case. As well attempt to do justice to Luther, while omitting the agonies and self-reproach of his cloister life, the deep formative influence of those silent months upon the Wartburg, as estimate Maximilian, the dreamer and idealist, by the necessities of his purse or the extravagance of his vast designs! His personality and his office do not by any means coincide. There are many features of his character which have no connexion with the government of his lands, which the historians of his own day overlooked, and which would still be overlooked from a strictly political and historical point of view. But while our admiration is aroused by his active share in the great living movements of the age, it must be confessed that his versatility and breadth of interest have an unfortunate counterpart in the fickleness and lack of concentration which led him to flit from scheme to scheme, without ever allowing any single one to attain to maturity. Such inconstancy in a sovereign is usually negatived, or at least held in bounds, by the apparatus of government. But in this case all centred in Maximilian himself, and not even the influential Matthew Lang was entirely trusted in high affairs of state. As a rule, Maximilian could not endure to have men of masterly or original character about him, mainly owing to the passionate conviction with which he clung to his own opinions, and partly perhaps to a half-conscious fear of unfavourable comparisons. We are thus driven to the conclusion that his policy is mainly his own work, and that, though inspired by lofty patriotism and definite family and {4} territorial ambitions, he never succeeded in combining the two motives, and finally left the problem unsolved and insoluble. But this conviction should only serve to remind us that his greatest achievements lie outside the province of politics. Indeed, regarded as a whole, his life is not so much a great historical drama, as an epic poem of chivalry, rich in bright colours and romantic episodes, and crowded with the swift turns and surprises of fortune. {5} II