While Christina was witching the northern world by the vigour and charm of her personality, Brandenburg under the cautious and unscrupulous Frederick William was slowly winning its way to predominance in north Germany. [Sidenote: =Frederick William of Brandenburg.=] No two persons could well be more different than the queen and the elector, whom at one time a marriage project of Gustavus Adolphus had attempted to unite in a most unequal yoke. Christina, worldly though she might be in her love of mischief-making and petulance of disposition, was essentially a woman of noble character and lofty aspirations. She lived amongst great thoughts and high ideals. Frederick William grovelled upon the earth, and cherished its mire and its dirt if only he could possess himself of one acre the more of it. A true Hohenzollern in his absolute identification of his country with his own crown, he never rose above the pure selfishness of patriotism. Not one spark of generosity illuminated his policy, not one grain of idealism coloured his ambition, no sentiment of moral right ever interfered with his judgment, no fear of future retribution arrested his action. Mean-minded, false, and unscrupulous, he was the first sovereign to display the principles of seventeenth century Machiavellianism, stripped of their cloak of Italian refinement, in all the hideous brutality of German coarseness. Yet the political world was not the worse for the rule of the Great Elector. Putting all questions of right and wrong on one side, the success achieved by Frederick William was in the direction of progress. [Sidenote: =Ultimate aim of his policy.=] The Thirty Years’ War left Germany shattered into fragments as if by the stroke of a giant’s hammer, at a time when all Europe was drawing itself together and coalescing into powerful states. Had that disintegration continued, had no one come forward to establish a power in northern Europe, which might at any rate form a nucleus round which the floating atoms of northern Germany and northern Protestantism might gather, central Europe must have fallen a prey to French ambition or Russian barbarism. Events have shown clearly enough, that neither Sweden, nor England, nor the United Provinces, could have saved Europe from such a catastrophe, had there not been in northern Germany itself a power, centralised in government and military in spirit, which could unfurl the flag of German nationality. To found such a power was the work of the Great Elector’s life, and before his death the results had made themselves visible in European politics. He it is who is the real founder of the state of Prussia. Cradled in the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War, nourished by the falseness and the tyranny of Frederick William, ushered into manhood by the cynical ambition of Frederick the Great, she has yet become in her steady protest against French domination one of the chief bulwarks of European