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'mädel,' too, was taken from him at the age of seven. He married again to please his mother; but the object of her choice, a Bavarian princess, was a poor victim of hereditary disease, whose early death was a release for both. Thenceforward, with strongly domestic tastes, and no relish for the ordinary dissipations of a court, he was left alone in the world; a circumstance to which, no doubt, was owing his passion for locomotion, indulged, during the life of his mother, and even afterwards, to such an excess that he might almost have rivalled Lord Peterborough's boast of personal acquaintance with all the crowned heads and postillions of Europe.

It was in this long and sorrowful period of apprenticeship that Joseph, like Frederic the Great, acquired, and in some degree deserved, that character of a 'sceptred cynic' which Lord Byron pronounces so peculiarly inappropriate for crowned heads. But in Joseph this was partly affected; not real and deep-rooted, as in his Prussian model and as he possessed nothing of Frederic's peculiar aquafortis style of wit, his exhibitions of contempt for mankind were tactless and unpleasing. He did himself, perhaps, more injury by his laboured smartnesses against religious fraternities and persons-ulemas and fakirs, as he thought it clever to call them-than by suppressing their convents. There is something singularly provoking, even now, to the reader of his correspondence, in the affected facetiousness with which he replies to men in earnest, like the Cardinal-Archbishop of Treves, who were defending to the best of their ability the alleged rights of their church. His nobility could more easily have forgiven his attacks on their privileges, and his attempts to diminish their importance by pitchforking into the class a herd of insignificant people-civil functionaries, municipal authorities, and the like, the notorious 'Bagatelladel' of Vienna

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than his parade of scornful maxims about the equality of mankind. It was in truth only uncivil and ungracious, though admired by republicans as an exhibition of noble sentiment, when he would turn away, on his travels, from some noble provincial lady who approached him with the style and ceremony which she thought befitting both their stations, to talk ostentatiously with his landlord's daughter. Even some of his best recorded sayings in the philosophic style, if happy in their general application, were needlessly offensive to those whom he addressed: as when he answered an appeal of some of the Vienna fine people to have the public kept out of a portion of the Prater, in order that they might consort with their equals-If I were to seek to consort with my equals, I must go down into the vaults of the Capuchin church.' These trifles even lost him more of real support than they gained of showy popularity; still more, no doubt, the grim satisfaction with which he gave his subjects, by way of corollary to his maxims, the spectacle of a count who had forged bank notes sweeping the street in chains, a grey-haired colonel of the guards who had plundered his military chest exposed in the pillory, and a well-born Magyar offender towing a barge at the same rope with the lowest criminals of the vassal Sclavonic and Rouman races; while, as a set off, a half savage Wallachian thief, caught exercising his vocation in the capital, was merely sentenced, like the colonel, to simple exposure,' in order to operate on his sense of shame! To the infinite amusement of the Viennese, he could not be made to comprehend the nature of the ceremony, and wondered what he had done to attain such honour.

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That philanthropy is a somewhat revolutionary virtue we know; excessive love of justice in a sovereign is scarcely less so. 'L'art de bouleverser les états (says Pascal) est

d'ébranler les coûtumes établies, en sondant jusque dans leur source, pour marquer leur défaut de justice: il faut, dit-on, recourir aux lois fondamentales et primitives de l'état, qu'une coûtume injuste a abolies. C'est un jeu sûr pour tout perdre: rien ne sera juste à cette balance.' His strong conscientiousness Joseph inherited from his mother, but the passion for ideal justice was his own. There can be no stronger instance of it, than that he assumed the power, unknown to sovereigns of Western Europe, of sharpening as well as remitting the sentences of criminal courts. Undoubtedly he was right in principle. Beccaria and Bentham expended almost a needless amount of acuteness in showing the absurdity of the feudal custom of pardon. If the executive does exercise the power of interfering with the sentences of the judicial body, it should unquestionably be with the object of correcting mistaken lenity as well as severity. But that a 'King's face should give grace' was a prejudice far too deeply rooted for Joseph to shake, and this innovation, founded on the purest intentions, was one of the first which he was compelled by public opinion to withdraw.

Closely allied with these peculiarities were an occasional roughness of manner, carried to affectation, a harsh and dictatorial air; an assumed outside, which covered singular delicacy as well as strength of sentiment, and feelings tremblingly alive to every variation in those of the persons whom he loved; an eager, inquisitive, but attractive bearing; a special fondness for refined, and particularly female, society-his only relaxation in later years, and in which he appeared to great advantage; being described by the minister, Kaunitz, in his barbarous Frenchified dialect, as ein ganz aimabler perfecter cavalier.' Baron Reitzenstein, author of a 'Journey to Vienna' (1789), describes not amiss this double aspect of Joseph's

outward demeanour. When I entered the room,' he says, the Emperor was still speaking to a gentleman to whom he gave some orders. His tone was so rough, so harsh, his pronunciation so Austrian, that the impression made on me was unpleasing in the highest degree. Immediately afterwards, two French ladies were introduced to him: how polite, refined, and soft his manner at once became! The imperious monarch disappeared : the most prepossessing attractive man of the world stood before me instead.' One of the most touching of the many pieces of his writing which remain is the billet of adieu to the Princess Francis Lichtenstein, written just before his decease, and addressed 'Aux cinq dames réunies de la société, qui m'y toléraient.'

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And in either character-whether under his assumed air of abruptness, or his natural geniality of manner—all agree as to the effect produced by the glance of his attaching and sympathetic eye. Kaiseraugenblau' was for a time the fashionable colour of the ladies of Vienna. It was an eye which seemed to recognise and speak to every one. There was something in Joseph's softness of heart, and also in the scrupulous earnestness with which he regarded his duties, which rendered it impossible for him to assume that official look of half-notice which every one must so often have observed in the optics of the powerful. It is a glance which seems compounded out of the fear of affronting some one who may be entitled to acknowledgment, and the fear of encouraging an address which may lead to inconvenient solicitation, or at least to the loss of valuable time. I cannot at all agree with that charming writer of travels, Aubrey de Vere, who, happening to meet the Sultan in a stroll through Constantinople, and being apparently a little discomposed by a look of this description, thus describes it: That gaze in which there

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is nothing of recognition, and in which no distinction is made between animate and inanimate objects, appears peculiar to the East; perhaps to absolute power in the East.' It is just as much occidental as oriental, and any one who wishes to realise it has only to go into the lobby of the House of Commons, and try to catch the eye of a minister, or other much preoccupied public man.

Such were the general characteristics of the sovereign on whom the task of regenerating a chaotic assemblage of dominions, unconnected except by the personal tie of sovereignty, and offering every possible variety of senseless misgovernment, rooted abuses, mutual prejudices and jealousies, devolved on the death of Maria Theresa. The sovereign of Austria was, in Austria itself, a native prince amidst a loyal population, but controlled by an enormously wealthy clergy and aristocracy; in Tyrol, he was the chief looked up to by an independent peasantry; in the Netherlands, the political head of a nest of mediaval commonwealths with clashing rights and usages; in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, he was a foreign potentate, governing an indifferent and sullen population with the aid of a nobility chiefly foreign like himself and an exotic hierarchy in Hungary, the feudal suzerain of a nation of nobles, interposing their proud will and their impracticable constitution between him and the millions of oppressed inferior races who vegetated in the background; in Galicia, Lombardy, and other outlying regions, a conqueror ruling absolutely by right of the sword. To wield an empire of such discordant materials was the problem laid before the House of Lorraine-Hapsburg in 1780, and remains the same problem still: for if in some points the difficulty may have diminished, thanks chiefly to the achievements of Joseph himself through the comparative reduction, for instance, of the noble and clerical power-it has in

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