constant dread, especially from the Turks' corsairs. No one town could claim precedence, though Amsterdam, even as early as 1600, struck De Rohan as equalled by few in Europe for wealth and beauty; it was rather the excellence and frequency of the towns that occasioned remark—twenty-nine fine ones within sixty leagues of boundary; together with the number of storks which the municipalities cherished, as animals known to harbour a preference for places where representative government flourished. As for the Empire, it meant many different things to different visitors. The variety of territory and government was absolutely bewildering, yet certain marked cross-divisions presented themselves, such as the triple division of it into upper Germany, Hansa League (with Saxony), and frontier; the frontier being those districts which were forever either meeting, or fearing, a Turkish invasion. Then there was division according to politics, Catholic, Reformed, Protestant, to be studied by the Average Tourist for purposes of alliance, and a third classification according to form of government, the imperial authority, venerable and increasingly vague; princes; "free" towns. The first system of division has, however, most in common with the greater number of foreigners' interests, and of its three sub-divisions upper Germany was paid the greatest attention, partly because it lay across so many routes, partly because there was so much to see. It gives the dominant note to references to German-speaking countries in the travel-literature of the day, a note of peaceful energy and hopeful prosperity. While not recommended to these travellers' notice by a well-known past such as the greater coherence of France and Italy had enabled historians to evolve for them, those who lingered there, as most did, saw that its possessions, human and non-human, gave it a present interest and a promise not surpassed elsewhere. The Germany of the last fifty years of the sixteenth century is practically ignored by modern English historians: the story of its continual activity and of its continuous relations with England contain none of those sensational hindrances to the advance of civilisation with which historians concern themselves, but the frequent references to those relations by the contemporary historian of Queen Elizabeth's reign, William Camden, bear witness to the current opinion and knowledge which found expression in the number of visitors from all quarters and the attention they devote to it in relation to that accorded to other countries.