to predispose him to favour any of his views; and after the treaty of Vienna in 1809, and still more conspicuously after the pacification of Europe, the political wisdom of the rulers of Austria inclined them ever more and more to the maintenance of that state of things which was known to friends and foes as the SYSTEM.

But what was the SYSTEM? It was the organization of donothing. It cannot even be said to have been reactionary: it was simply inactionary. About the contemporary proceedings of the restored tyrant in Piedmont, when he sent for a copy of the old Court almanac, and had everything arranged on the pre-revolutionary model, there was, it must be admitted, a cer tain foolish vigour; but in Austria there was nothing of the kind. Mark time in place' was the word of command in every Government office. The bureaucracy was engaged from morning to night in making work, but nothing ever came of it. Not even were the liberal innovations which had lasted through the reign of Leopold got rid of. Everything went on in the confused, unfinished, and ineffective state in which the great war had found it. Such was the famous SYSTEM which was venerated by the ultra-Tories of every land, and most venerated where it was least understood.

Two men dominate the history of Austria during this unhappy time--men who, though utterly unlike in character and intellect, were nevertheless admirably fitted to work together, and whose names will be long united in an unenviable notoriety. These were the Emperor Francis and Prince Metternich. The first was the evil genius of internal politics; the second exercised a hardly less baneful influence over foreign affairs.

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The Emperor Francis was born at Florence in 1768. His slender natural abilities received little aid from education during the first sixteen years of his life, but in 1784 he was summoned to Vienna, to be trained, under the eye of Joseph II., for the great office to which his birth had destined him. account of his hopeful pupil, by the Emperor's own hand, still remains to us; and it would be difficult anywhere to find a more pungent satire. The selfishness, the falsehood, the dislike of intellectual exercise, the love of all things mean and trifling -which are the principal features in the imperial portrait, as traced by the hands of his guardian-grew with his growth, and were not corrected by his misfortunes. True it is, that whereas in youth he shunned all public business, he worked in age with the assiduity of a laborious employé, but this was only because he had discovered that public as well as private affairs have their trifling side. In later life he liked to have as many documents as possible accumulated in his cabinet; but it was

always the important ones which lay for weeks upon his table, and the unimportant ones to which he attended. In every part of his empire, as in his own entourage, he loved to repress whatever was vigorous or noble, to promote what was commonplace and insignificant. I want,' he said to the Professors at Laybach, obedient subjects, and not men of learning.'Totus mundus,' he declared at Pesth, stultizat et vult habere novas constitutiones;' and although this sally was coupled with a compliment to the ancient franchises of Hungary, his conduct amply showed that he hated them as heartily as the bran-new charters of Cadiz or of Paris. His natural love of what was vulgar led him to prefer the Vienna dialect; and he was cunning enough to see that he could, by indulging this taste, obtain no little popularity in the capital. His fancy for busy.idleness made him delight in giving audiences; and during a single journey in Italy he is said to have received 20,000 people. This habit gained him the approbation of the unreflecting, who forgot that the time spent in useless activity was stolen, not from the amusements or pageants of the Court, but from the real duties of the monarch-duties which, had he honestly sought to discharge them, would have overwhelmed a far abler man; for he had concentrated in his hands the management, or mismanagement, of the whole of the Home Department and of the Police. This last was his favourite branch of administration, because the reports of his agents supplied him with all the gossip of the Empire, a pleasure which he purchased, as all rulers do who have similar tastes, by becoming a puppet in the hands of the vilest of mankind. Such a character and such a system of government naturally resulted in driving the best men far away from Court, and in giving a premium to worthlessness and servility. Some idea of the state of things may be formed from the fact that one of his prime favourites was the infamous Kutschera, who, when in the height of his influence, got into trouble with the police for appearing, of course in the most primitive of all costumes, at one of the so-called Adamite balls in Vienna,--a proceeding which was passed over by his master, with a remark which had rather the character of a jest than of a reprimand. Yet the private life of the monarch was correct, and he may be not unreasonably suspected of having encouraged the prevailing vices of those around him with the express object of degrading them.

The father of Prince Metternich had left the service of the Elector of Treves for that of the Emperor, and had been employed in various diplomatic missions, chiefly amongst the small Courts of the Rhine-land. His son, born at Coblentz in 1783, won in his earliest days the character which he preserved to the

end, and was fin, faux, and fanfaron' before he passed out of boyhood. Throughout life he preserved the impress of the gay and joyous life which characterized the capitals of the small potentates, whom the revolutionary period swept away; and long as he lived in Vienna he never became an Austrian, or understood the vast and heterogeneous empire with which his name is so closely connected. Neither at the University of Strasburg nor elsewhere does he seem to have received more than a superficial culture, and his first success was gained while acting a part in the ceremonial of the imperial coronation at Frankfort, rather by the elegance of his manners and his good. looks than by any more solid acquirements. He soon passed into the imperial service, and was sent as Minister to the Court of Dresden, when only eight-and-twenty. Here there was little to do, but Berlin, to which he was presently removed, offered a wider field for his fine powers of intrigue. He managed so dexterously to recommend himself to his French colleagues, that it was soon intimated at Vienna that his presence as Austrian minister in Paris would be agreeable to Napoleon, and immediately after the battle of Wagram, he took, as the supposed representative of French interests, the reins of the Foreign Department, which he held till they dropped from his hands in the grand overturn of March 1848. His relations to his suspicious master must have been at first extremely difficult, but his great tact soon enabled him to make himself indispensable, and the pair thoroughly understood each other. Sinere res vadere ut vadunt,' was the motto of the Emperor in all internal affairs; and for the external policy of Prince Metternich, the first and most necessary condition was, that Austria should give to Europe the impression of fixed adherence to the most extreme Conservative views. So for many years they worked together, Prince Metternich always declaring that he was a mere tool in the hands of his master, but in reality far more absolute in the direction of his own department than the Emperor was in his. For Prince Metternich, although by no means a man of very great intellect, or deep and broad culture, was at least par negotiis,' while his master, potent in details and inefficiently active, was constantly being led, in important matters, by men who appeared to be the humblest of his creatures. Prince Metternich had the power of making the most of all he knew, and constantly left upon persons of real merit the impression that he was a man of lofty aspirations and liberal views, who forced himself to repress such tendencies in others because he thought that their repression was a sine quâ non for Austria. The men of ability who knew him intimately thought less well of him. To them he appeared vain and superficial, with

much that recalled the French noblesse of the old régime in his way of looking at things, and emphatically wanting in every element of greatness.

With the outbreak of the Greek insurrection in 1821, began a period of difficulty and complications for the statesmen of Austria. There were two things of which they were mortally afraid-Russia and the Revolution. Now, if they assisted the Greeks, they would be playing into the hands of the second; and if they opposed the Greeks, they would be likely to embroil themselves with the first. The whole art of Prince Metternich was therefore exerted to keep things quiet in the Eastern peninsula, and to postpone the intolerable question d'Orient.' Many were the shifts he tried, and sometimes, as just after the accession of Nicholas, his hopes rose very high. All was however in vain. England and Russia settled matters behind his back; and although the tone which the publicists in his pay adopted towards the Greeks became more favourable in 1826-7, the battle of Navarino was a sad surprise and mortification to the wily Chancellor. Not less annoying was the commencement of hostilities on the Danube between Russia and the Porte. The reverses with which the great neighbour met in his first campaign cannot have been otherwise than pleasing at Vienna. But the unfortunate success which attended his arms in the second campaign soon turned ill-dissembled joy into ill-concealed sorrow, and the treaty of Adrianople at once lowered Austria's prestige in the East, and deposed Metternich from the commanding position which he had occupied in the councils of the Holy Allies. It became, indeed, ever more and more evident in the next few years that the age of Congress politics, during which he had been the observed of all observers, was past and gone, that the diplomatic period had vanished away, and that the military period had begun. The very form in which the highest international questions were debated was utterly changed. At Vienna, in 1814, the diplomatists had been really the primary, the sovereigns only secondary personages; while at the interview of Münchengratz, between Nicholas and the Emperor Francis, in 1833, the great autocrat appeared to look upon Prince Metternich as hardly more than a confidential clerk.

The dull monotony of servitude which oppressed nearly the whole of the Empire was varied by the agitations of one of its component parts. When the Hungarian Diet was dissolved in 1812, the Emperor had solemnly promised that it should be called together again within three years. Up to 1815, accordingly, the nation went on giving extraordinary levies and supplies without much opposition. When, however, the appointed

time was fulfilled, it began to murmur, and very soon the Government discovered that, instead of dealing with a single Diet assembled at Presburg, it was engaged in the still more hopeless task of attempting to coerce a miniature Diet in every county of the kingdom. The inhabitants of more civilized portions of the monarchy--the Viennese themselves, for example, could be amused and kept in good humour without thinking of politics; but to the Hungarians the excitement of political life was a necessity. It was as hopeless to try to eradicate from their minds the desire for free political discussion as it has been found in many districts of Western Europe to root out the attachment to particular forms of religion, which were not to the taste of the ruling powers. Year by year the agitation went on increasing, till at last the breaking out of the Greek revolution, and the threatening appearance of Eastern politics, induced Prince Metternich to join his entreaties to those of many other counsellors, who could not be suspected of the slightest leaning to constitutional views. At length the Emperor yielded, and in 1825, Presburg was once more filled with the best blood and most active spirits of the land, assembled in Parliament. Long and stormy were the debates which ensued. Bitter was, from time to time, the vexation of the Emperor, and great was the excitement throughout Hungary. In the end, however, the Court of Vienna triumphed. Hardly any grievances were redressed, while its demands were fully conceded. The Diet of 1825 was however not without fruit. The discussion which took place advanced the political education of the people, who were brought back to the point where they stood at the death of Joseph II., that is, before the long wars with France had come to distract their attention from their own affairs. The hands of the party which, while it wished to preserve the old constitution. as against Austria, saw that that constitution required amendment, were greatly strengthened, and France and England were taught for the first time to sympathize with the liberal aspiration of a country which had most truly, up to that time, been Terra Incognita.'

Sharp as was the contest between the Government and the people in Hungary, it caused little excitement in the provinces on the western bank of the Leitha. The tranquil surface of the public mind was, however, rippled by the Greek revolution. There was too little classical knowledge in Austria to call forth such enthusiasm as was excited in England, or even in North Germany, but some memories of the Turkish wars remained, and in Prague the Czechish population, which was beginning to awake from a sleep of two centuries, did not forget that in Bosnia, in Servia, and in other districts of the eastern Peninsula,