stamping-mill to be reduced to pulp. He had the images of the saints stripped of their wigs, hoop petticoats, and other precious pieces of devout finery; altered the theatrical style of the Church music, and caused mass to be sung in German; abolishing at the same time most of the large processions which were then, and are now, such a hindrance to secular business, and such an incentive to immorality, in Austria and all other Romanist lands. the giant strides which he had made in the path of progress; but unfortunately his health soon failed, and his constitution, undermined by early excesses, gave way amidst the hardships of a campaign against the Turks. His last days were shadowed by troubles in the Netherlands, excited in the first instance by the enraged hierarchy and the discontented aristocracy. In Hungary, for the sake of peace, he, when dying, revoked most of his reforms, which were not appreciated by the people, being disliked chiefly, perhaps, on account of the centralizing tendency of some of his measures. Pope Pius VI., alarmed at the reforming energies of this active son of the Church, and having a high conceit of his own powers of persuasion, sent Joseph word that he would come to see him at Vienna, and have some fatherly talk with Having taken leave of all his friends, him. He came accordingly, and was re- and, as far as he could, made peace with ceived in Germany with curiosity and his foes, Joseph still worked hard at his welcome, no Pontiff having deigned to dispatches as late as the day preceding his tread that soil for nearly four hundred death. When he had dismissed his secreyears. The Emperor received "His Ho-taries, feeling, as he said, the agony of liness" with respectful kindness, but managed politely to thwart all his attempts at giving him a lecture on religious subjects. The poor Pope betook himself in chagrin to old Prince Kaunitz; but this was going from bad to worse; for when Pius offered his hand to be kissed, Kaunitz, affecting to misunderstand the movement, seized it heartily, and gave it a good English shake, repeating loudly, "De tout mon cœur!" The Pontiff also honored him with a visit at his picture gallery; but Kaunitz pushed his sacred person about so unceremoniously, now planting him on the right, and then hurrying him to the left, to get the best point of view, that the owner of the triple head-piece afterwards confessed himself to have been "tutto stupefatto," not having been used to such irreverent treatment. He returned to Rome without having accomplished his benevolent object of rectifying the errors of the quasi-Lutheran Emperor and his "ministro eretico." We can not pursue the narrative of Joseph's numerous reforms in Church and State. Many of these raised him up bitter enemies amongst his own people, who preferred the dog-trot of the old despotism to the brisk pace of the new. Much fanatical fury was excited against his person, principally on account of his religious liberality. The priests of course made a great outcry against him, and urged the Tyrolese into rebellion. Yet he would, probably, in time have received the thankful homage of all his people for death within him, he desired his confessor to read to him St. Ambrose's hymn, (Te Deum laudamus,) and then prayed in these words: “O Lord, who alone knowest my heart, I call Thee to witness that every thing which I undertook and ordered was meant only for the happiness and welfare of my subjects. Thy will be done!" He died early in the morning of February 20th, 1790; and his life was justly epitomized in his own words: "Here rests a Prince whose intentions were pure, but who had the misfortune of seing all his plans miscarry." Joseph's mode of life had been exceedingly simple. He dispensed with all the absurd pomp and ceremonial of his ancestors, and dressed and ate and worked like a private man. He was very fond of music, and of its great living master, Mozart; and was himself an excellent performer on the piano, and a good base singer-talents which he was not at all shy of exercising at either public or private concerts. He had a great liking for travel, and generally made a yearly tour under the incognito of "Count Falkenstein." This habit sometimes gave rise to amusing scenes; as when he arrived at Rheims before his attendants, and the inquisitive landlord asked him, while shaving himself, whether he had the honor of belonging to the Emperor's suite, and what post he filled: to which Joseph's good-humored reply was, "I sometimes shave him." In his own capital it pleased him to walk freely about, and mix unknown with his people; and in case of a flood or a fire, he was usually the first on the scene of the catastrophe, and worked away lustily with his own imperial hands. His great failing, indeed, (if we may so say,) was that very excess of energy which made him impatient of all delay, and urged him to precipitate measures which required years for their gradual introduction and proper appreciation. He forgot that man is such a slave of habit, that he takes slowly and ungraciously to any change, however much for his benefit. By Joseph's death, his brother, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, was raised to the throne under the title of LEOPOLD II. Kind-hearted, but weak-minded, he in a few short weeks undid the labors of his brother's life, replacing the administration on its old footing in most respects. His health having been ruined by profligate indulgence, his reign was very short, and was chiefly distinguished by the Convention of Pillnitz, in which Austria agreed to take up arms against the French, and so became involved in a series of disastrous wars. Leopold was accustomed to amuse himself with alchemy and chemistry; and his death appears to have been proximately caused by taking some rather strong quackpills of his own manipulation. In his cabinet were found, amongst a number of articles which one would scarcely have supposed necessary to the art of good government, nearly one hundred pounds of rouge! The last Emperor of Germany, and the first of Austria per se, FRANCIS, succeeded his father in 1792, and occupied the throne till 1835. The events of his long reign are so involved in the intricacies of European warfare and diplomacy, that it would be impossible here to afford a perfect outline of them. Under the mask of bonhommie Francis hid crafty meanness and thorough heartlessness, and he had the happiness to be served by as paltry a set of wretches as he could possibly have desired -men troubled with no sort of principle, no love of country, no tenderheartedness; who thought themselves the most cunning of men, because they contrived to make their immoralities forward their political intrigues, and could gloss over malice and chagrin with the French polish of a hypocritic smirk. The secret history of the wars and treaties with France is a most painful and disgraceful one. In previous reigns we may be disposed to make every allowance for the harsh and mistaken measures of men brought up in a cramping routine, and to yield a certain amount of respect to the faithful firmness with which they promoted their master's selfish interests. But under Francis II., Austrian statesmen, properly speaking, there were none. The successors of Kaunitz were, for the most part, grinning gamesters, who cared little for any thing but their own places and vile enjoyments, and were ready to part with the Tyrol, Venice, any thing, if they only might have left to them the corruptions of the capital and the pleasures of peace. After the battle of Wagram, Francis, who really hated Napoleon with all the hatred that a puny tyrant bears to a strong one, was sufficiently subdued in 1810 to give him his daughter Marie Louise in marriage. In the following year Austria was reduced to the humiliating position of declaring itself bankrupt. This measure of course fell with terrible effect on the working part of the community; but the butterflies of the Court fluttered about more gaily and gaudily than ever. In 1813, the Austrian emperor, after the crafty Metternich had woven a complicated web of intrigue, once more declared war against Napoleon, son-in-law though he was. Now followed the battle of Leipzig, and the Treaty of Paris; the great disturber of nations was consigned to Elba; and the Congress of Vienna met to map out Europe afresh, erecting some of the fallen landmarks, but forgetting the proper place of others. Great was the array of princes and diplomatists, beauties and adventurers, then assembled in the gay German capital. But ere long the lingering festivities were disturbed by the terrible news that the Corsican tiger had escaped from his cage. Prussia and England once more took the field, and, as we are not likely to forget, the French were beaten at Waterloo. Then came the visit of the allied monarchs to Paris, where Francis of Austria stayed several months. During the middle and latter part of his reign, the Emperor left all the business of the state to Prince Metternich, his States Chancellor, with the exception of some paltry affairs which it pleased his narrow mind to pry into. Yet we must do him the justice of allowing that he did not neglect one important duty incumbent upon an absolute monarch-that of read 1857.] THE EMPERORS OF AUSTRIA. ing the reports of his secret police, and receiving personally information from his spies. What was the feeling of this governor towards the governed may be inferred from his celebrated speech: "The people! what of that? I know nothing of the people; I know only of subjects." When his physician, Baron Stifft, once told him, in a congratulatory speech about his health, that there was nothing like a good constitution, Francis exclaimed, "What do you say? We have known each other very long, Stifft; but let me never hear that word again. Say, "robust health," or, if you like, "a strong bodily system;" but there is no such thing as a good constitution. I have no constitution, What were his and never will have one." notions of justice and mercy, let the cells of the Spielberg testify, where Silvio Pellico, Ottoboni, and many other men of refined mind and gentle manners, were doomed to spend years of hopeless misery. Francis was fond of his garden, and tended his plants with a much lighter and tenderer touch than that paternal one which he reserved for his subjects, especially the Lombards. He also amused himself with making boxes and bird-cages, varnish, sealing-wax, and such like: in fact, he was much better fitted to be a small cabinet-maker, and belabor a few apprentices, than to rule over millions of men. He died, at the age of sixty-seven, in 1835, having outlived three of his four wives, at whose demise he manifested about as much concern as Bluebeard himself. His prime minister, Prince Metternich, whose name is identified with the whole of the last half-century of Austrian history, was descended from an old Rhenish family, and possessed the liveliness and volatility characteristic of the race. Having also the advantage of a pleasant face and fine figure, his plan of action was so to combine the beau with the statesman as to make his pleasures the means of eliciting the deepest secrets of both hostile and friendly courts. Of a more generous disposition than his master, he yet managed to play the game of despotism well: in fact, more than once Francis owed the retention of his dominions to the finesse of his intriguing States Chancellor. Metternich was at once the type and the defence of the dissipated crowd of nobles who throng the purlieus of the Austrian Court. Held back by no notions of morality, thinking every trickery fair 191 in politics and in love, worshiping the The principal events in the reign of The present emperor has not as yet done any thing toward the fulfillment of the fair promises which he made when his beclouded uncle was dethroned in his favor. On the contrary, he took the first opportunity of annulling that Constitution to which he so solemnly swore on his accession; and having played false with Hungary, and annihilated what little civil liberty existed in his dominions, he seems to have done his best, by the Concordat with the Pope and other ill-advised measures, to place himself and his subjects at the mercy of the Romish tyranny. What ameliorations of policy may result from his recent tour through his Lombardo-Venetian territories, remains yet to be seen; but little dependence can be placed on imperial promises lavished in a popularity-hunting visit. The tardy liberation of a few political prisoners, and the invitation to his refugee ex-subjects to come and live secure with them under the surveillance of the Austrian police, do not strike us as very promising auguries for the future. Yet we will venture to hope for the best. The Italians under the Austrian rule have shown so much constancy to their princi- tyranny, aggravated by the new access of ples, and so much self-restraint amidst cir- power accorded to the ultramontane priestcumstances peculiarly trying to southern hood: but the well-wisher to its people temperaments, that we can not but believe may draw comfort from the fact-familiar that brighter days are approaching for to every tracer of the history of nations them, if they only remain true to them--that the proudest triumph of the Jesuits selves. Over the whole Austrian Empire is invariably the immediate precursor of now rests the deepest shade of secular their deepest fall. HOMEWARD HO! We welcome Mr. | mendous spectacle of the empire's decay, Kingsley as an old friend, on his return to England and the nineteenth century. It is some years since he left us, and left his opinions of us also, in Alton Locke and Yeast, which were no pleasant keepsakes, Our readers will recollect that he then gave no flattering testimony to our social condition. We suspect it was his ill-concealed disgust of the French novel sentimentalism, which brooded like a malaria over our drawing-room society, and the stubborn finality spirit, which fixed our practical counting-house men in a catalepsy, so that they would neither be coaxed nor spurred into his novel plans for the cure of our social malaise, which drove him upon his long and adventurous tour. What wonders he has seen, what experience he has gained, in his wild aërial travels, are they not contained in Hypatia and Westward Ho? With an easy flight he passed to the shore of the Nile, and into the dim antiquity of the fifth century. Opening there the dazzling lights of his imagination, he dispersed the thick mists which shrouded that awful scene, and we see before us, as though we were bodily present, the tre *Two Years Ago. By C. KINGSLEY. Three Vols. Macmillan & Co. and the gigantic towering growth of the Christian Church, which bursts from the rotting folds of the huge imperial system, as the awakened Lazarus from his grave clothes. The broad, fat, yellowish Nile swells and flashes down from fabulous deserts, haunted with frightful ogres and monsters of every goblin shape, through the plains of Egypt to the Delta and the city of Alexandria. Along its banks, and in that city, Mr. Kingsley pictures the death of the Old World, with its Paganism and Philosophy, and the birth of the New. And he could have chosen no site on which the relics of the fading past, and the germs of the dawning future, are brought into more startling contrast-in which the hubbub and seething turmoil of that transition epoch are more fearfully exhibited. We look up a quiet valley, and see there cells of monks scooped out in rows from the rock on either side, and the dull hermits are hoeing in the fields between; while on the hill above, against the purple haze of the setting sun, there stands the spectral wreck of a mighty. Temple, old as the time of Noah's sons, on whose rents "the red lights rests, like dying fire on defiled altars." In Alexandria, Mr. Kingsley has heard Hypatia, the beautiful Pythoness, the last and most and pining povery in other times and lands than ours. These sights have softened him; he has come back a wiser man, to settle contented, even amidst the horrid clank of machinery, and the screech of our steam-engines, which make the nineteenth century such an intolerable bore to chivalrous spirits like his. Moreover, the war has redeemed our character in his eyes. It has proved irrefutably that the men of England are not a set of manufac tured Guy Fawkeses, sewed up with packthread, stuffed with cotton rags, and goggling with inky eyes, only fit, like all shams, for the terrible burning. Kingsley has found out that, even among such, there are men who have real souls in them, and can shed real blood too, if need be, in defense of truth and honor. Mr. glorious teacher of the proud stoicism and | times abroad; he has seen bloated wealth Elysian dreams, which were woven together like a rich flowery damask in NeoPlatonism. He has conversed with Orestes, the polished effete sensual governor of Alexandria; has watched his scheme of revolt against the Roman emperor; has seen him lure Hypatia from the tranquil heights of philosophy by the too tempting promise of making her Empress of Africa, and crushing for ever this frenzied faith in a crucified Jesus. He has stood in the presence-chamber of Cyril, the stern prelate, who laughs at the writhing impotency of Orestes, and explodes, by a touch, his hollow schemes of revolt and empire. He has looked from a balcony upon the legions of Nitrian monks rushing at midnight through the streets of Alexandria, (like a lava torrent,) under the ruddy glare of torchlight, till Cyril's message hushed the storm, and recalled them to their grated dormitories. And all the other mirabilia of that eventful age, surely he has seen them ere he described them with such vivid accuracy and thrilling power in Hypatia. He fought with Heraclitus on the scorched campagna of Rome, hunted jerboas and ostriches with Syrenius-argued about the Song of Solomon with Augustine, Bishop of Hippo; and then we lost him, nor heard more of his adventures, till suddenly we learned that he had come to the reign of our good Queen Bess, and was reveling in the wild romance of those days when the discovery of the New World awoke the old Viking temper lurking in our Norse blood; when the great battle of Protestantism and spiritual liberty was fought by England for the world; and when, amidst the splendor and exaltation of these events, as Emerson says, "the English mind flowered in every faculty," and Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Hooper, Raleigh, Bacon, were the familiars of their age. And now, after years of wandering, we welcome our somewhat errant genius as he lands on the Devon coast, to visit again the modern times, and the civilized England, which he forsook in scorn years ago. Friends ask us how he looks after his dire and perilous voyage through so much time and space. And what does he think of us now? In answer to the first of these questions we have to say, he likes us now much better than he did; and therefore, we frankly own it, we like him much better. We fancy he has seen hard VOL. XLI.-NO. II. Let the foregoing be our proëmium to the short outline, and shorter criticism, of Mr. Kingsley's story we shall now lay before our readers, and which we hope may serve to introduce them to the three volumes themselves. The opening scene of the tale is laid in Aberalva, a fishing-village on the Devonshire coast. In fact, in this little place most of the mischief is brewed-if love-making, of which there is abundance in every variety, may be so termed; and if not, yet there is mischief of another kind, which ends at last in a woeful tragedy. Mr. Kingsley is never weary of painting scenes from the home of his childhood. In Westward Ho! in Glaucus, and again in these volumes, the shores of Devonshire crusted with shells, its upland wolds golden with gorse blossoms, and the lush fragrant vegetation of its meadows and hedge-rows, are described again and again with enamored fondness, as if he felt these earliest impressions of nature to be the purest and most blessed—“for Heaven lies about in our fancy "-and would lovingly expend his best art to reproduce the scenes which first awed and thrilled his imagination with a sweet enthusiasm, "More bright than madness or the dreams of wine." Some of our readers may have strolled through Aberalva (though we cannot discern its real name under this pseudonym) two years ago, i. e., in the month of July, 1854. If so, there and then the story begins. The houses lie in a long line along 13 |