IN a former volume ¹ we considered at length
the condition of Central Europe at the close
of the period known as the Middle Ages. It
will suffice here to recapitulate in a few para-
graphs the general position.

The time was out of joint in a very literal
sense of that somewhat hackneyed phrase.
Every established institution--political, social,
and religious--was shaken and showed the rents
and fissures caused by time and by the growth
of a new life underneath it. The empire--the
Holy Roman--was in a parlous way as re-
garded its cohesion. The power of the princes,
the representatives of local centralised authority,

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