But this life was most of all detrimental to the nobles themselves; their love of plunder, and their pugnacity, made them turn as much against their fellow-nobles as against the cities, and through the whole of the middle ages led to innumerable feuds. When the feud was notified by letter, some days previous to the beginning of hostilities, it was considered honourable. Any trifle was sufficient to occasion a feud: never-ending boundary disputes, encroachments on the chase, or the flogging of a servant, caused discord, even between old comrades and friendly neighbours. Then both parties strengthened themselves by the assistance of relations and dependents; they enlisted troopers, and endeavoured to learn through the medium of spies how they could gain an advantage over the property, house, or person of their adversary. The opulence of the cities, and the rancour entertained by the nobles against the rising independence of the citizens, gave an agreeable excitement to their feuds with the latter. Whoever was unable to establish a profitable feud of his own, united himself as an assistant to another, and thus old comrades were often by the chapter of accidents opposed, and then, in the full consciousness of doing their duty, would beat and even stab each other. This marauding life on the highways, in the woods and caverns, and with drunken companions, was neither favourable to their family life nor to their higher interests, nor was it even fitted to develop warlike capacity except among the subordinates. At the best, it only formed leaders of small bodies of mounted troopers for foraging expeditions and surprises. Sickingen himself, the most skilful specimen of a Junker of the sixteenth century, showed in his great and decisive feud, only very moderate talents as a general; and the capacities of Goetz, in a military point of view, do not stand higher than those of an experienced serjeant of hussars. Thus wild, vicious, and detrimental to the community, was the conduct of even the quietest of the lower nobility. Their being a privileged order whose members considered themselves superior to citizen of peasant, who kept themselves apart from others, in marriage, business, law, manners, and ceremonials, made them for centuries weak, and their existence a misfortune to the people; but at the same time it saved them from the ruin consequent upon their disorderly life. On retrospect of the act itself, there is little difference to be seen between the robber who now waylays the wanderer on the lonely heath, and the country nobleman who about the year 1500 dragged the Nuremberger merchant from his horse and kept him in a dark prison upon bread and water, whilst the noble's wife made coats and mantles out of the stolen cloth. But three hundred and fifty years ago, the noble robber practised his evil deeds with the feeling, that though his actions were perhaps contrary to the decrees of an