"But we pay taxes for all enjoy ments in this world; no wonder therefore, that the Austrian, like other great eaters, became indolent and heavy in his motions, and acquired a character for taking things easily, both in the cabinet and the field, which history will not soon allow to fall into oblivion. The ostrich is the largest of birds, with a stomach that devours iron; but it has very worthless wings, or, properly speaking, none at all. Charles lost the Spanish suc. cession by indecision in the Cabinet; and many victories have been lost while the Austrians were deliberating over their dinners, as the ancient Germans did over their drink.

'Langsam voran-langsam voran! Damit die Landwehr halt folgen kann!'*

resa,

"Would you perfectly understand,' said the Count Windisch-Grätz to an engineer in the time of Maria Thethe great deliberation with which we set about all our affairs, get from some man in authority a promise to pay-fifty strokes, and I bet you a louis d'or you will have to wait a quarter o' year before you get payment.' In Joseph's day, things were managed differently. Joseph was Frederick in all things; and had he lived two decades earlier, Silesia had never been Prussian. Daun, his Fabius Maximus, he would certainly have brought into more expert exercise; and as for the numberless Fabii of the Aulic Council of the empire-with them, in the latter part of his reign, Joseph positively refused to have any thing to do. Of a truth, only at Vienna do people practically understand what the philosophical phrase VIS INERTIÆ means; though they might have learned, from Kaiser Albert II.'s motto long ago-Geschwind gewinnt'-that dispatch is the soul of business. For myself, I never can forget a worthy Viennese whom I met early one morning in the neighbourhood of the Linien. He greeted me with a guten morgen so kind and friendly as only a Viennese can give; and this encouraged me to catechise him a little in detail about my plan of operations for the day, which was, to ramble over the neighbouring hills till

evening-losing my dinner of course -with only a dry biscuit and a bit of cheese in my pocket. My easy friend could not understand the pleasure of such peregrination. He laughed heartily, holding his sides- Dos ist holter a rechte Teufels commotion ! That is a devil of a commotion, indeed!'-God bless thee, thou genuine son of the good old Kaiser, (KOASER, I ought to say, dwelling with the true Viennese breadth of complacency on the word,) and may angels carry him and thee gently to heaven in a litter!"

The following passage on the Austrian army, however fairly it begins, ends in the same strain :

"The Austrian army, which consumes almost the fourth part of the yearly income, numbers 300,000 men; and with the militia, (landwehr,) and the Hungarian insurrec'tion, can, in time of need, be increased to 600,000. 'Tis a noble armyWhat men are these grenadiers! Only the French Guards of Napoleon stood higher. The cavalry and artillery are excellent; and a main advantage they have in the number of light troops, which once and again brought Frederick to perfect despair: they cut off the supplies of the enemy; cover the retreat of the main army in the case of a defeat, and in the case of victory harass the enemy. It is strange that, with these admirable light troops, the wars of the revolution can boast so very few successful surprises on the part of the Austrians; whereas, in the wars with the Prussians, history records more than one brilliant sortie of this kind. No army in the world has better built, more robust, more valiant, and better conditioned men than the Austrians. What bodies, set against the French or the Prussians! And yet they were obliged to knock under to both; for not the BODY, but the SOUL strikes the blow in which lives victory. They read Greek in Austrian universities also, I believe; and they might have learnt from Plato, in the Alcibiades, that the soul only is the man, the body a mere instru

ment."

And, in the following passage, our

pleasant old bachelor almost reaches the sublime of indignancy :

"Blessed God! what a country might this Austria be, and become, could it only shake itself triumphantly out of the old world of feudalism, reconcile itself with the spirit of the age, that acknowledges no more the exclusive privileges of nobility and clergy, but the good of the nation; and, above all, learn to bring out a thing that lies as yet sleeping, the MORAL POWER of its noble state! With genius and enterprise, the spirit of a Joseph at the head of every department, Austria were the prime state in Europe!-Was Madame de Staël so much in the wrong, when she wrote

les bases de l'edifice social sont bonnes et respectables, mais il y manque UNE FAITE et des COLONNES, pour que la GLOIRE et le GENIE puissent y avoir un temple?'

"Johannes Von Müller, like many other strangers, was treated in Vien na, not exactly according to his taste. His history of Switzerland lay near his heart; but that they would not allow him to print there; and the situation of first librarian, to which, above all men, he had a legitimate claim, he could not obtain because of Catholicism. He went accordingly to Berlin; but it was not without a pang that he left the good city of the Kaiser"les Autrichiens sont bons, IL Y A DE L' ETOFFE, il y a quelque chose du cordial, c'est une belle monarchie!' said he. Right, every thing here is full of life, merriment, and heart's content; and if the stranger sometimes feels dull here, and sooner than he might expect, there is only one cause of this -viz. that, if not in the highest, yet certainly in the middle class of society,

there is too much SPIRITUAL DEADNESS. I cannot give it a gentler name. Into the head of no mortal man could it ever enter to prefer Berlin to Vienna, were it not these same spiritual chains that pinched Müller. When will they learn to look upon books as something better than mere fashionable furniture; and when will they boast a nobler philosophy than that Eudæmonism, whose first proposition is

Losst's gehen wie's geht!' (let things go as they are going!)-and the second- Aber wer hätte das gedacht?'-(but who could have fancied that ?)"

With this every true British man will agree cordially. We now see where we are clearly. The Austrians have attained in social life neither to the strength of Michael Angelo, nor to the divine beauty of Raphael, but merely to the material mellowness and fleshly lusciousness of Titian. The goddess that sits on the Danube is neither a Juno nor a Pallas, but only a Venus. More than this, indeed, we scarcely think the system of political and ecclesiastical paternity can, even under the most favourable auspices, effect. It does not appear that the Roman Catholic religion, whose spirit is dominant in Vienna,* views with any particular jealousy the healthy development of the fleshly functions, or mere animal, of the laity; but it does appear, and belongs indeed essentially to the idea of a clerical caste on which Romanism is based, that the free development of mind is viewed with an excess of jealousy, sufficient, even without calling into account the system of centralization in civil things, to account for the intellectual deficiency of the Viennese. No doubt, like the

Prussians, the Austrians boast a superior school-organization; but the human plant does not grow naturally in those schools; every rule of teaching is anxiously prescribed, and every motion of the growing energies is curiously constrained. The confessor and the censor, and the commissary of police, watch over every genial irregularity, till the fair muscularity of nature, in the estimation of these good people, becomes an enormity, and the starry shootings of genius are looked upon as fearful comet wanderings, presaging desolation. The Austrian education is practical, mechanical, utilitarian, in the highest degree: a certain dexterity of the fingers, so far as their easy animal good-nature allows them to be dexterous, they doubtless acquire; but that undefinable something which is most godlike in man, that which makes Shakspeare, Dante, and Milton great; that which, though no education can give it, a jealous system of priestly and bureaucratic supervision can certainly suppress, they must be content to remain without. On this subject we may hear Mr Turnbull :

"On the intellectual faculties the effect of the whole system of education must necessarily be of an equalizing, not an exciting character. In proscribing the wild vagaries, so often encouraged in other states, it may tend not unfrequently to cramp the force of genius into a sort of stunted uniformity; but this is not inconsistent with the genius of a philosophy which aims at training the child for contentment in the path of life, whereever Providence has placed it; and represses all that may tend to disturb, even by the force of intellectual energies, that general tranquillity, which it conceives to form the greatest happiness of the greatest number."

And then he describes admirably the national character as formed by this system :

"When the mère wants of nature are supplied, no people on earth are so happy in themselves as the Austrians. No people are more attached to their existing institutions-more mild and kindly in their dispositions towards others-more free from bad and malignant passions. Patient, docile, and obedient, they are faithful subjects,

soldiers, and servants. Tranquil and enjoying, they are benevolent superiors, landlords, and masters. Simpleminded in the belief of their own religion, whatever it be, and preserved by the strong hand of government from ever hearing controversial discussion, they are tolerant and INDIFFERENT as to the creeds of others. Well-instructed in practical science, they are excellent military and civil engineers and artificers, mechanicians, and manufacturers. On the other hand, without being indolent they are carel ss and unenergetic in their general pursuitsregardless of the value of time-and without that ambition to excel which brings enterprise to perfection. Their classical acquirements, even at their principal universities, are rarely adequate to render them able crítics, or profound scholars. Their easiness of temper produces, in certain respects, a somewhat lax and indulgent morality; and, in point of daring original genius, it is rare to see a work of literature art, or science, proceed from an Austrian."

So much for the dark side of the picture; but let us "not be high-minded, but fear." God gave us freedom, as he gave to certain trouts, by the agency of a benevolent individual, who let them out of my lady's private pond into a large mill-dam; but there were pikes in the mill-dam that were not in the pond. In this free country there walks abroad a monster not seen in Austria, called party spirit. It is naught, it is naught, says the left hand to the right, because I did it not. "All that the subjects of a constitutional monarch ask, is permission to utter periodical expressions of contempt towards him and his office," said a Viennese philosopher to Mrs Trollope. Not so. Our bickerings in this free country are not with the monarch, but with one another; and as we are always battling, we can never see any thing calmly and clearly as it is, but always in reference to the present weal and the present advantage. It is the nature of soldiers; they cannot stop to measure how far the bayonet goes in, when they are on the charge. We write newspapers, tormenting, calumniating, anathematizing one another daily-the Viennese sing songs.

Perhaps you feel inclined to prefer this. Very natural. It is pleasant for an easy man to lie down on a pillow; but remember that war, as Mr Alison somewhere says, is the condition of existence; our state under the moon is a state militant. We must endure hardness, like good soldiers, in a political as well as a religious sense. This must be our consolation. In despotic countries, as in Austria, where there are no popular energies, it is a cheap praise to say, that you have made a peaceful people. Properly speaking, it is not that much lauded Austrian peace and tranquillity after which the world is striving; it is the balance of power and the harmony of opposite functions that society, through much trouble and tribulation, would attain. We cannot rest in a forced peace; we cannot submit to a mechanical tranquillity; we cannot snatch premature civilisation from a withholding Providence; our pieced mosaic never can be a living organization. Nevertheless, these people in Vienna, though centralization and Popery will never manufacture manhood, are a good people, and we can afford to love them perfectly, Les Autrichiens sont bons, et il y a de l'etoffe, c'est quelque chose de CORDIAL, c'est UNE BELLE MONARCHIE! Ja wohl, mein Herr!' Without a doubt it is a beautiful monarchy! And as for DESPOTISM-that ugly word -how many centuries have elapsed since England had her Henry VIII. making and unmaking creeds as gallantly as any Joseph? Constitutions are not built, though as we have all seen they may be overturned, in a day. There is, undoubtedly, much in Austria that a mind trained under the popular institutions of Great Britain would wish to see altered. As Protestants and limited-monarchy men, we are compelled to think somewhat

narrowly, perhaps-that under their present system of combined spiritual and civil absolutism, the Austrians can never arrive at the perfect estate of social manhood; but this system, like every living thing in the world, is not a thing stereotyped. Unless it be already crumbling into dissolution, it is capable of improvement and enlargement in thousandfold ways; nay, its very tenure of existence is a calm, silent expansion and enlargement, according to laws which, in their full extent, God only can measure. Our representative constitution in Britain. was a growth. There is no people in the world whose development, in this respect, has been more similar to our own than the Austrian. In that country, we find all the elements in full vigour out of which our own constitution has grown-King, Lords, Commons, and Clergy. There have been no Prussian military levellings, no French volcanic outbreakings there. Perhaps they are on the same road with ourselves, travelling only more slowly, and making less noise ;-children of the same father but of dif ferent ages. Be it so. We hate to be critical. If the Austrians have not produced a sublime Dante, or a strong Shakspeare, they are also free from the brilliant negations of a Voltaire, and the grand peevishness of a Byron. Their brain certainly is not of the surging, billowy, onward naturethis is the worst that can be said of them; but a man's happiness does not consist in the multitude of books which he has written it is not the head, but the heart, which makes the man. The Austrians are too goodnatured, take things too easily; but there is "stuff" in them, and they are healthy at the core. We may apply to them what Burke said of FoxVerily, they are a people made to be loved."