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Hammerfeldt's political dominance seemed to them to be based on a personal ascendency; this they must contrive to match. Their instrument was not far to seek. The Countess was ready to their hand, a beautiful woman, sharpest weapon of all in such a strife. They put her forward against the Prince in the fight whereof I was the prize. All this I saw, against it all I was forewarned, and forearmed.

The opinion has long been expressed by German writers and is very widespread in Germany that it is Great Britain that claims an ascendency or supremacy, and that Germany in opposing that supremacy is making herself the champion of the European cause of the independence of States.

The Pope had no sovereign rights, but only the ascendency inseparable from his wealth and from his position as Primate of Christendom. At the same time the spirit of Arnold of Brescia, of Brancaleone, and of Rienzi revived from time to time in patriots like Porcari and Baroncelli, who resented the encroachments of the Church upon the privileges of the city.

The great nobles, who hated Philip on the one hand, and the Reformed religion on the other, were obliged, in obedience to the dictates of a people with whom they had little sympathy, to accept the ascendency of the Calvinist Prince, of whom they were profoundly jealous.

He, however, first prepared some papers and placards, which he posted up in public places, in which he proclaimed that Hannibal was far from considering himself finally conquered; that he was, on the contrary, forming new plans for putting down his enemies in Carthage, resuming his former ascendency there, and carrying fire and sword again into the Roman territories; and, in the mean time, he urged the friends of Hannibal in Carthage to remain faithful and true to his cause.

When the strife of Guelfs and Ghibellines, Neri, and Bianchi, had exhausted her in the fourteenth century, she submitted for a while to the indirect ascendency of the kings of Naples, who were recognized as Chiefs of the Guelf Party. During the fifteenth century she was kept continually disturbed by the rivalry of her great merchant families.

"And is not a discipline thus addressed to the purpose of fixing religious principles in ascendency, as far as that difficult object is within the power of discipline, and of infusing a salutary tincture of them into whatever else is taught, the right way to bring up citizens faithful to all that deserves fidelity in the social compact?...

Sometimes, indeed, he had behaved to Ernest in a way which did not bode well for the harmony with which the College of Spiritual Pathology would work when it had once been founded. It almost seemed as though he were trying to get a complete moral ascendency over him, so as to make him a creature of his own.

"Ad majorem Dei gloriam," was the motto emblazoned on their standards, and written on their hearts; but this glory of God was synonymous with the ascendency of their association.

This interpolation and ascendency of strangers was a continual source of jealousy and ire to the ancient retainers of the olden heritage, and continually threatened to break out into open feud, had not the soothing policy of the Countess Margaret and her descendants, by continually employing them together in subjecting other petty clans, contrived to keep them in good humor.