Steady enough of seat at last, after many vain trials! For during those hundred and fifty years,--among those six intercalary Kaisers, too, who followed Albert,--they were always trying; always thinking they had a kind of quasi right to it; whereby the Empire often fell into trouble at Election-time.

For they were proud stout men, our Hapsburgers, though of taciturn unconciliatory ways; and Rudolf had so fitted them out with fruitful Austrian Dukedoms, which they much increased by marriages and otherwise,--Styria, Carinthia, the Tyrol, by degrees, not to speak of their native HAPSBURG much enlarged, and claims on Switzerland all round it,--they had excellent means of battling for their pretensions and disputable elections.

None of them succeeded, however, for a hundred and fifty years, except that same one-eyed, loose-lipped unbeautiful Albert I.; a Kaiser dreadfully fond of earthly goods, too.

Who indeed grasped all round him, at property half his, or wholly not his: Rhine-tolls, Crown of Bohemia, Landgraviate of Thuringen, Swiss Forest Cantons, Crown of Hungary, Crown of France even:--getting endless quarrels on his hands, and much defeat mixed with any victory there was.

Poor soul, he had six-and-twenty children by one wife; and felt that there was need of apanages! He is understood (guessed, not proved) to have instigated two assassinations in pursuit of these objects; and he very clearly underwent ONE in his own person.
Assassination first was of Dietzman the Thuringian Landgraf, an Anti-Albert champion, who refused to be robbed by Albert,--for whom the great Dante is (with almost palpable absurdity) fabled to have written an Epitaph still legible in the Church at Leipzig.