ARMY OF THE EMPIRE RAISED.

When the king of Prussia was put under the ban of the empire, the several princes who compose that body were required, by the decree of the Aulic council, as we observed before, to furnish their respective contingents against him. Those who feared him looked upon this as a fair opportunity of reducing him; and those who stood in awe of the house of Austria were, through necessity, compelled to support that power which they dreaded. Besides, they were accustomed to the influence of a family in which the empire had, for a long time, been in a manner hereditary; and were also intimidated by the appearance of a confederacy the most formidable, perhaps, that the world had ever seen. Yet, notwithstanding all this, the contingents, both of men and money, were collected slowly; the troops were badly composed; and many of those, not only of the protestant princes, but also of the catholics, showed the utmost reluctance to act against his Prussian majesty, which, indeed, none of them would have been able to do had it not been for the assistance of the French under the prince de Soubise. The elector palatine lost above a thousand men by desertion. Four thousand of the troops belonging to the duke of Wirtemberg being delivered to the French commissary on the twenty-fourth of June, were immediately reviewed; but the review was scarcely finished, when they began to cry aloud that they were sold. Next morning thirty of them deserted at once, and were soon followed by parties of twenty and thirty each, who forced their way through the detachments that guarded the gates of Stutgard, and in the evening the mutiny became general. They fired upon the officers in their barracks, and let their general know that if he did not immediately withdraw, they would put him to death. Meanwhile, some of the officers having pursued the deserters, brought back a part of them prisoners, when the rest of the soldiers declared, that if they were not immediately released, they would set fire to the stadthouse and barracks; upon which the prisoners were set at liberty late in the evening. Next morning the soldiers assembled, and having seized some of the officers, three or four hundred of them marched out of the town at that time, with the music of the regiments playing before them; and in this manner near-three thousand of them filed off, and the remainder were afterwards discharged.