This was in the days of Maximilian's youth. He is a prince who seems
to have been almost as inferior in his foreign to what he was in his
domestic policy as was Queen Elizabeth. He is chiefly familiar to us
as failing to keep up his authority in Flanders after the death of
Mary of Burgundy, as lingering to fulfil his engagement with Anne of
Brittany till he lost her and her duchy, as incurring ridicule by his
ill-managed schemes in Italy, and the vast projects that he was
always forming without either means or steadiness to carry them out,
by his perpetual impecuniosity and slippery dealing; and in his old
age he has become rather the laughing-stock of historians.
But there is much that is melancholy in the sight of a man endowed
with genius, unbalanced by the force of character that secures
success, and with an ardent nature whose intention overleapt
obstacles that in practice he found insuperable. At home Maximilian
raised the Imperial power from a mere cipher to considerable weight.
We judge him as if he had been born in the purple and succeeded to a
defined power like his descendants.
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