In defending Maximilian upon those charges, his friends had betrayed a natural warmth at the injustice offered to his character; and the liveliness of the dispute on this point had nearly ended in a way fatal to their unanimity on the immediate question at issue. Good sense, however, and indignation at the Landgrave, finally brought them round again to their first resolution; and they separated with the unanimous intention of meeting at noon on the following day for the purpose of carrying it into effect.

But their unanimity on this point was of little avail; for, at an early hour on the following morning, every one of those who had been present at the meeting was arrested by a file of soldiers on a charge of conspiracy, and marched off to one of the city prisons. The Count St. Aldenheim was himself the sole exception; and this was a distinction odious to his generous nature, as it drew upon him a cloud of suspicion. He was sensible that he would be supposed to owe his privilege to some discovery or act of treachery, more or less, by which he had merited the favour of the Landgrave. The fact was that in the indulgence shown to the Count no motive had influenced the Landgrave but a politic consideration of the great favour and influence which the Count's brother, the Palsgrave, at this moment enjoyed in the camp of his own Swedish allies. On this principle of policy, the Landgrave contented himself with placing St. Aldenheim under a slight military confinement to his own house, under the guard of a few sentinels posted in his hall.

For him, therefore, under the powerful protection which he enjoyed elsewhere, there was no great anxiety entertained. But for the rest, many of whom had no friends, or friends who did them the ill service of enemies, being in fact regarded as enemies by the Landgrave and his council, serious fears were entertained by the whole city. Their situation was evidently critical. The Landgrave had them in his power. He was notoriously a man of gloomy and malignant passions; had been educated, as all European princes then were, in the notions of a plenary and despotic right over the lives of his subjects, in any case where they lifted their presumptuous thoughts to the height of controlling the Sovereign; and, even in circumstances which to his own judgment might seem to confer much less discretionary power over the rights of prisoners, he had been suspected of directing the course of law and of punishment into channels that would not brook the public knowledge. Darker dealings were imputed to him in the popular opinion. Gloomy suspicions were muttered at the fireside, which no man dared openly to avow; and in the present instance the conduct of the Landgrave was every way fitted to fall in with the worst of the public fears. At one time he talked of bringing his prisoners to a trial; at another, he countermanded the preparations which he had made with that view. Sometimes he spoke of banishing them in a body; and again he avowed his intention to deal with their crime as treason. The result of this moody and capricious tyranny was to inspire the most vague and gloomy apprehensions into the minds of the prisoners, and to keep their friends, with the whole city of Klosterheim, in a feverish state of insecurity.

This state of things lasted for nearly three weeks; but at length a morning of unexpected pleasure dawned upon the city. The prisoners were in one night all released. In half an hour the news ran over the town and the university; multitudes hastened to the college, anxious to congratulate the prisoners on their deliverance from the double afflictions of a dungeon and of continual insecurity. Mere curiosity also prompted some, who took but little interest in the prisoners or their cause, to inquire into the circumstances of so abrupt and unexpected an act of grace. One principal court in the college was filled with those who had come upon this errand of friendly interest or curiosity. Nothing was to be seen but earnest and delighted faces, offering or acknowledging congratulation; nothing to be heard but the language of joy and pleasure – friendly or affectionate, according to the sex or relation of the speaker. Some were talking of procuring passports for leaving the town – some anticipating that this course would not be left to their own choice, but imposed, as the price of his clemency, by the Landgrave; – all in short was hubbub and joyous uproar, when suddenly a file of the city guard, commanded by an officer, made their way rudely and violently through the crowd, advancing evidently to the spot where the liberated prisoners were collected in a group. At that moment the Count St. Aldenheim was offering his congratulations. The friends to whom he spoke were too confident in his honour and integrity to have felt even one moment's misgiving upon the true causes which had sheltered him from the Landgrave's wrath, and had thus given him a privilege so invidious in the eyes of those who knew him not, and on that account so hateful in his own. They knew his unimpeachable fidelity to the cause and themselves, and were anxiously expressing their sense of it by the warmth of their salutations at the very moment when the city guard appeared. The Count, on his part, was gaily reminding them to come that evening and fulfil their engagement to drink his aunt of jovial memory in her own Johannisberg, when the guard, shouldering aside the crowd, advanced, and, surrounding the group of students, in an instant laid the hands of summary arrest each upon the gentleman who stood next him. The petty officer who commanded made a grasp at one of the most distinguished in dress, and seized rudely upon the gold chain depending from his neck. St.