Spaniards and Dutch stand electrically fronting one another in Cleve for seven years, till their Truce is out, before they clash together; Germany does not wait so long by a couple of years.
SYMPTOM FOURTH, AND CATASTROPHE UPON THE HEELS OF IT.
Five years more (1618), and there will have come a FOURTH Symptom, biggest of all, rapidly consummating the process;--Symptom still famed, of the following external figure: Three Official Gentlemen descending from a window in the Castle of Prag: hurled out by impatient Bohemian Protestantism, a depth of seventy feet,--happily only into dung, and without loss of life.

From which follows a "King of Bohemia" elected there, King not unknown to us;--"thunder-clouds" all in one huge clash, and the "continent of sour smoke" blazing all into a continent of thunderous fire: THIRTY-YEARS WAR, as they now call it! Such a conflagration as poor Germany never saw before or since.
These were the FOUR preliminary SYMPTOMS of that dismal business.

"As to the primary CAUSES of it," says one of my Authorities, "these lie deep, deep almost as those of Original Sin.

But the proximate causes seem to me to have been these two: FIRST, That the Jesuit-Priests and Principalities had vowed and resolved to have, by God's help and by the Devil's (this was the peculiarity of it), Europe made Orthodox again: and then SECONDLY, The fact that a Max of Bavaria existed at that time, whose fiery character, cunning but rash head, and fanatically Papist heart disposed him to attempt that enterprise, him with such resources and capacities, under their bad guidance." Johann Sigismund did many swift decisive strokes of business in his time, businesses of extensive and important nature; but this of the slap to Neuburg has stuck best in the idle memory of mankind.

Dusseldorf, Year 1613: it was precisely in the time when that same Friedrioh, not yet by any means "King of Bohemia," but already Kur-Pfalz (Cousin of this Neuburg, and head man of the Protestants), was over here in England, on a fine errand;--namely, had married the fair Elizabeth (14th February, 1613), James the First's Princess; "Goody Palsgrave," as her Mother floutingly called her, not liking the connection.