history. He illustrates in practical life, as Dürer in artistic and intellectual life, the age that was passing away, and he foreshadows more than Dürer the age that was coming on. He was romantic by nature, a lover of the chivalric and picturesque elements of mediæval life; he was skilful in all the manly sports which belonged to a princely education—a daring hunter, and brave in the lists of the tourney; in affairs of more moment he had always some great adventure in hand, the humbling of France, or the destruction of Venice, or the protection of Luther; at home he was devoted to reform, to internal improvements, to establishing permanently the orderly methods of civilization, to the spread of commerce, and to increasing the safety and facility of communication. He left his empire more civilized than he found it; and if he was unsuccessful in war, he was, in the epigram of the time, fortunate in love, and won by marriage what the sword could not conquer, so that he prepared by the craft of his diplomacy that union of the vast possessions of the House of Austria which made his grandson, Charles V., almost the master of Europe. He was a lover of art and books; and, being puffed up with imperial vanity, he employed the engravers and printers to record his career and picture his magnificence. The great works which by his order were prepared for this purpose were upon a scale unthought of before that time, and never attempted in later days. The Triumphal Car, which he employed Dürer to design, was a richly decorated chariot drawn by six pair of horses; the Emperor is seated in it under a canopy amid female figures, representing Justice, Truth, and other virtues, who offer him triumphal wreaths; the driver symbolizes Reason, and guides the horses by the reins of Nobility and Power;
