A happy accident has preserved to us three autobiographies of well-known German nobles of different periods of the 16th century, those of Berlichingen, of Schaertlin, and of Schweinichen; one of them, so long as the German language lasts, will be intimately associated with the name of the greatest German poet. These three men, who flourished in the beginning, the middle, and the end of this celebrated century, were widely different in character and destiny, but all three were landed proprietors, and each of them has recorded the events of his life, so as to give an instructive insight into the social condition of his circle. The best known is Goetz von Berlichingen; his memoirs were first published in 1731. The halo, with which three hundred years after his death, Goethe's charming poem has invested him, will make it difficult for the reader of his biography to separate the ideal delineation of the poet from the figure of the historical Goetz. And yet this is necessary. For however modestly and lovingly Goethe has portrayed his character, he appears quite different in history. When as an old man, in a time to which he was a stranger, he wrote his life, he loved to dwell on the knightly exploits of his wild youth. It was not his line to enter into political questions; if he found himself in a crisis he acted according to the advice of his patrons,--the great sovereigns, who employed his strong arm and steadfast will for their own objects. When the peasant army broke into his territories, he and his kinsmen were utterly at a loss what to do, and wrote for advice. The answer was suppressed by his mother-in-law and wife, and he was left to his own judgment, and had not sufficient adroitness to withdraw himself from the thronging insurgents. Had he been like many of his cotemporaries, such as Max Stumpf, he would have abandoned the peasants in spite of all his vows. But although not really faithful to them, true to the letter of his word, he adhered to them till the four weeks were passed, for which he had bound himself though he was not in fact their leader but their prisoner. After that he lived some years in close imprisonment, then for a long time in strict confinement at his castle. He was surrounded by a new generation, engaged in vehement strife, and he himself was grieving the while that he had acted in the peasant struggle as an honourable knight, and that still true to his word, he had even now to count the steps which he was allowed to take beyond the gates of his castle. After sixteen years of solitary seclusion he was in his old age twice called to take part in the warfare of a younger race, which neither brought him adventures nor any opportunity to acquire fame or booty. When at last he died in peace at his Castle of Hornburg, at the age of eighty-two, Luther had been dead sixteen years, and the Emperor Charles V. had been interred in a cloister four years before; but the long period from the year 1525