THE ROBBER-CASTLES.

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last, to assume the more respectable name of toll or transitdues, and the robber-castles to be dignified by the name of" zoll-kauser," where "black-maü" was levied upon all theunlucky merchants who happened to pass that way.

This system of pillage had risen to such a height towardsthe end of the thirteenth Century that the Emperor Rodolphof Hapsburg, in one year, razed no less than seventy of thesebandit strongholds (" raub-schlösser," robber palaces, as the ruinsare called to this day), and condemned to death twenty-nine ofthe noble highwaymen. Still the evil was too deeply rootedto be overcome by royal power, and it was not until seventyGerman cities, large and small, had combined to resist thenobles of Franconia and Swabia, (who were the chief of thebanditti, and who always demanded a considerable portion ofthe merchandise passing through their domains before theywould let it proceed), that the System of wholesale plunder,under the name of toll or passage-money, could be in any waymitigated. But even then it was far from being entirelycrushed, for the nobles themselves began to confederate afterthe example of the merchants; and it was only when thepowerful Hanseatic League was at its height, in the fifteenthCentury, that the lordly robber - race was, comparativelyspeaking, exterminated from Germany,

Ifi.

The Robber-Castles—from " Mouse" to Pfalz.

It was Dean Swift who, touched by the subtle truthsof Berkeley's Theory of Vision, spake of seeing as an art;