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THE following biographical sketches may find some excuse in the fact that five at least are not well-worn subjects to the English reader, and all deal with characters of singular interest and wide importance in their several times.

The endeavour has been, in each case, to detach the man from these times, a task not always easy: the individual is so apt to be dwarfed and even hidden by the events that surrounded his personality.

For this reason the complications of the Thirty Years' War, those of the Austrian and Spanish Successions, are dealt with as slightly as is consistent with a coherent relation; details of these and the other historic happenings referred to will be found in the books quoted in the bibliography that follows each subject; these bibliographies, though of course by no means exhaustive, cover a fairly wide range and will afford a comprehensive amount of information.

The subject of the spelling of foreign names must always be a vexed one; without pedantry one must be capricious, for rio satisfactory fixed rule on this matter has yet been found; the author has used the usual accepted English spelling of most well-known proper names, and here and there the foreign forms when these referred to less familiar people or places and appeared to give more life and colour to the narrative; there may be a great virtue in the spelling of a name, and the author was loath to sacrifice Carlos and Dom Sebastião and only reluctantly gave up Loys.

On the other hand, Gustav Adolf and Hermann Moritz von Sachsen savoured too obviously of affectation; the usual compromise on this difficult question has therefore been adopted; whatever way is chosen the author generally comes in for criticism, which this explanation is not so hopeful as to expect to disarm.

There are no portraits, of course, of Frederic II and few of Dom Sebastião; none of those of Louis XII support his contemporaries' opinion of his good looks, and those of Maurice de Saxe are also disappointing though characteristic of his flamboyant period.

On the other hand, the portraits of Carlos II and Gustavus Adolphus II are abundant and fine; most interesting both as historical documents and as likenesses, though, even here, neither the ugliness of the one nor the beauty of the other is so apparent as one might have expected.

Many of these stories contain, oddly enough, a mystery; in each case the sensational explanation has been rejected or ignored, because there seems to be slight foundation whatever for it in every instance.

The conspiracy of Pietro da Vinea is obscure beyond hope of elucidating now; but many tales have grown up round the death of Dom Sebastião, of Marie Louise d'Orléans, of Maurice de Saxe, the fall of Gustavus Adolphus at Lützen.

Did Sebastião return to Portugal long after the disaster where he was supposed to have perished?

Was Maurice de Saxe killed in a duel with the Prince de Conti?

Was the Queen of Spain poisoned by the Austrian party in Madrid?

Was the great Swede treacherously slain in the confusion of the battle?

There seems little evidence for any of these suppositions, yet a doubt will in all the cases continue to linger, until the day when some industrious researcher of archives puts the questions at last beyond dispute, as one such worker appears to have already put the question of the death of Dom Sebastião.

The author, in dealing with these debatable points, has not followed the romantic tradition of accepting anecdotal tales, which, however often repeated, only rest on dubious evidence and are obviously embellished by fancy, but has tried to keep as near the truth as is possible in following authorities so often conflicting.

It may be noted that many of the terms used, "balance of power," etc., express conceptions of political economy now outworn, but these same conceptions were very powerful in their day and embodied ideas that swayed the statesmen of Europe up to the period of the Congress of Vienna; they have therefore, though obsolete at the present moment, been adopted.

M. B.,

London, August 1927.