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 1922 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 439 Gordon's house to the awful nocturnal solitude in which the chief victim of the house of Austria's revenge was massacred the most signal interest of the publication before us, after all, belongs to its concluding portion, or third book (epilogue), where the personage upon whom our attention is principally concentrated is neither Wallenstein nor the emperor, but he with whose name Schiller's tragedy ends Piccolomini. He was foremost among the actual directors of the execution with Gallas (with whom he was by no means on the easiest of terms) and Aldringen, as he was to be one of the most prominent in the long list of its beneficiaries, which extended in the one direction to the most efficient among the soldiery employed and in another to the Spanish envoy Onate and the Jesuit novitiate of St. Anne at Vienna. In view of the abundant recompense, the expectation of which had been, to say the least, a chief incentive to their participation in the action, and in view of the tremendous responsibility incurred by its perpetrators, Picco- lomini and his associates had, from the first, used every effort to cast the main burden of that responsibility upon the emperor himself, and thus to make it manifest to the world at large, official and non-official, military and civil, home and foreign, that while the chief agents of his policy acted within the limits of their own responsibility, that was entirely covered by his own. The effect of the doom of Wallenstein and his faithful followers on a world engaged in a deadly war of religions, nations, and interests had been the inevitable one, and Ferdinand's nature was not such as to stand firm in face of the storm. Only a few days after the consummation had been reached, the emperor had been advised to inform the sovereigns and imperial ambassadors of Europe by means of a circular in several languages, that the punishment of the now dead chief traitors and rebels had been carried out ' without any expression of opinion or command on the part of His Imperial Majesty '. Yet, at first, the feeling at Vienna seems to have been that everything depended on convincing the world of the guilt of Wallenstein and his companions, and that the necessity was consequently imposed upon the emperor of carrying out the execution against them. But though such was the tenor of the earliest official or inspired expressions in the pamphlet literature of the moment, it was soon borne in upon the Austrian court that something more was needed. In one of the most notable productions of contemporary Wallenstein-literature, on which already Ranke bestowed very special notice, Alberti Fridlandi Perduellionis Chaos sive Ingrati Animi Abyssus, may be recognized a deter- mined endeavour to crush all doubts as to the extent of Wallenstein's guilt and the consequent justification of his doom ; and Hitter von Srbik, who returns to the subject of the authorship of this work in an appendix, has demonstrated that though it was composed by one who shared the opinions of Count Slawata, perhaps the most inveterate of Friedland's adversaries, its actual author was the Jesuit court-preacher Father Johannes Weingartner, from whose learned and rhetorical pen also proceeded the pamphlets usually quoted as An Expediat and Exhortatio Angeli Provinciates. With his colleague Lamormain (to whose authorship the Chaos has also been ascribed), Weingartner, whose religious prin- ciples and educational ideas were alike permeated by political purpose,