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The Ascanier Cousins, high Saxon dignitaries some of them, gloomed mere disappointment, and protested hard; but could not mend the matter, now or afterwards. Their Line went out in Saxony too, in course of time; gave place to the WETTINS, who are still there.
Multiply a year of Otto by 200, you have, on easy conditions, some imagination of a History of the Ascanier Markgraves. Forgettable otherwise; or it can be read in the gross, darkened with endless details, and thrice-dreary, half-intelligible traditions, in Pauli's fatal Quartos, and elsewhere, if any one needs.
Waldemar was the last, or as good as the last, of the Ascanier Markgraves; and he, two years before Ludwig ever saw those countries, died in his bed, twenty-five good years ago; and was buried, and seemingly ended. Perkin Warbeck, POST-MORTEM Richard II., Dimitri of Russia, Martin Guerre of the CAUSES CELEBRES: it is a common story in the world, and needs no commentary now.
That Berlin should have grown, after it once became Capital, is not a mystery. It has quadrupled itself, and more, within the last hundred years, and I think doubled itself within the last thirty. One Ascanier Markgraf, and one only, Otto IV. by title, was a Poet withal; had an actual habit of doing verse. One of his lines is, "Ich wunsch ich were tot, I wish that I were dead:"
The latest Austrian Kaisers, the latest Kings of Prussia, they are sons of these two men. We have said nothing of the Ascanier Markgraves, Electors of Brandenburg, all this while; nor, in these limits, can we now or henceforth say almost anything.
The Ascanier had to be content with the more pristine state of acquisitions, high pedigrees, old castles of Ascanien and Ballenstadt, territories of Anhalt or what else they had; and never rose again to the lost height, though the race still lives, and has qualities besides its pedigree.
Two years before the victory at Muhldorf, a bad chance befell in Brandenburg: the ASCANIER Line of Markgraves or Electors ended. They had lasted there about two hundred years.
There were plenty of Ascanier Cousins still extant in those parts, Saxon dignitaries, Anhalt dignitaries, lineal descendants of Albert the Bear; to some of whom, in usual times, Albert's inheritance would naturally have been granted.
The Brandenburgers, mindful of their old Ascanier sovereigns, were ill affected to Ludwig and the new Bavarian sort. The Anhalt Cousinry gloomed irreconcilable; were never idle, digging pitfalls, raising troubles. From them and others Kurfurst Ludwig had troubles enough; which were fronted by him really not amiss; which we wholly, or all but wholly, omit in this place.
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