triumph at the half-loaf of black bread which an honest and kind-hearted workman brought out to him; and, alas! as often he had fled away in terror as some rude churl had cursed him for his plaints, and threatened to set his wolf-hound upon his heels. He one day had been for some time groaning through want of food, and while his young, emaciated hands pressed his sides, in order to surprise his throes into a moment's stillness, he was resolving to abandon the martyrdom of learning, and to return to the mines in which his father was then so laboriously delving, when a kind-hearted woman (Frau Cotta was her name) opened her door, gently bore the poor exhausted boy into her house, wisely fed him and restored his strength, kept him with her, and thus saved the future Reformer of half Europe.

Strange contrast between this the condition of his childhood, and that in which he had now returned to Eisenach! And yet even the latter, sublime though it was, was not without an anguish as acute and as threatening as had been his early poverty. He had just been standing fearlessly, and amidst ennobling associations, before an emperor and princes; he who had almost knelt before a peasant's door for the rudest food. The voice that had moaned, and moaned in vain, amid sleet and snow, had become a trumpet-blast summoning, and responded to by the mightiest nations of the earth. And yet cruel perils confront his footsteps! He may not perish by cold, but he may perish, and some few days hence, by flames!

Amsdorff, his faithful friend—that one who had clung

to his side throughout his late appalling trial, was remaining silent, in reverential sympathy with his feelings, when he was suddenly startled by an advancing hand which, passing himself, gently grasped one of Luther's.

"You here, my lord?" exclaimed Doctor Martin, SO soon as he felt the touch, and as he raised his suffused eyes upon eyes upon Count Arensberg, who had hastened to the Reformer's side, the moment he discerned his

person.

"I am here; we are all here, Reverend Father," he returned emphatically.

"All here, my lord?" again asked Luther.

" All!"

But little time was lost before Luther was introduced by Arensberg to the room where the ladies were assembled. It was curious to observe how either party held friendly contest which should first recount the circumstances of the other. Our readers already know them, and so we content ourselves with adding, that Luther's history of his own proceedings was just that which some days before he had written to his friend Cranach, the celebrated painter.

"My arrival at Worms," said he, somewhat in the spirit of merry sarcasm, "was unexpected; and how the safe-conduct was observed you may have heard from the prohibition which met me on the way. I had supposed his Imperial Majesty would have assembled about fifty Doctors, and in a fair way have confuted the monk. But only thus much was done:- Are these

books yours?'Yes.' 'Will you retract them or no?' 'No.' Then away with you.'"

Long into the night, after the ladies had retired, did Luther and the Count continue in earnest council.

"And you purpose then, my lord," said the former, as they were about to separate, " to leave your charge, to-morrow, at Castle Wartburg, and then to proceed quick to court?"

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Such, Reverend Father, I had resolved upon," returned the latter; "but the strange absence of my brother Rupert perplexes me, I must own. I sent to him a message, by our good friend Schwärtz, directing him to obtain for me the Elector's leave to do so. And then he returned an answer that he would be here himself this very night-where can he be?"

"Take a poor monk's advice," said Luther, after musing deeply," and, instead of risking the displeasure of our wise sovereign, wait (shall I say?) at Erfurt. Perhaps," he added, "your brother may have been, unexpectedly, despatched elsewhere.”

"And your purpose, Father?" inquired the Count. "For Wittemberg, my lord; and if death await me, may our God grant it may be among scenes where I first saw the light of life!" was the rejoinder.

CHAPTER XXI.

WHILST we have been detailing some few of the events that took place during Martin Luther's most memorable appearance before the Diet, we have been forced to lose sight of facts, connected with his trial, which, though more general in their nature, are, nevertheless of indispensable importance to our narrative. We would, therefore, mention some of them.

The young emperor, Charles V., is not (and we now speak historically) to be regarded as having been a theological partizan against the great Reformer. It is true, that every hereditary and every educational tendency ought to have made him a faithful son of the Papal Church, and that, as such, his antagonism to the views of Martin Luther must have been direct and determined; seeing, especially, that he had never had an opportunity of judging the merits of that Reformer's movements. Still, this imperial child of the popedom was not without latent sympathies with one great purpose for which the monk at Wittemberg was contending. It could not escape his notice, that this same monk had carried out, and with vast if not equal

earnestness, his protest against the political as well as the theological heresies of the Roman See. Each of the Electors had carried with him to the Diet a copy of the Appeal which Luther had published and distributed "To the Emperor and the German Nobility;" and this had caused him to run over its contents.

It was, therefore, next to impossible but that his Majesty should, in spite of his religious prejudices, look with favour (covert, though circumstances might make it) upon one who challenged independence for his own imperial sceptre, and self-responsibility for himself in union with his own domains; who hurled bitter anathemas, and in the pure spirit of a lofty patriotism, against the arrogance of that Papal pride which had made his ancestors bow the knee to the fisherman at Rome, which presumed to hold even the highest earthly dynasties within its grasp and at its disposal, and was, at the same moment, expecting vassalage from himself as the condition on which he should hold his

crown.

Young though was the Emperor Charles V., he saw all this, and he estimated it. And, though he apparently lent himself to the priesthood that surrounded him, and, for reasons politic, sanctioned their intrigues and chicaneries against his bold and uncompromising subject, there is every reason to believe that he willingly connived at any and every effort which the Reformer's friends made on his behalf.

But nevertheless the Emperor believed that policy