PRINCE METTERNICH was born at Coblenz on the 15th of May, 1773. Like his father, he commenced public life as a diplomatist, at the Congress of Rastadt, and crowned his brilliant career in that capacity at the Congress of Vienna, where he presided over kings, princes, and statesmen of every cast, and of almost every shade of character.

Perhaps no statesman ever had a more perverse fate to contend with than Prince Metternich. At the dawn of his official career he found a system which the Emperor Francis had been labouring to construct for twenty years upon the ruins of the great work of reform which had been commenced by his predecessor, Joseph II. Anterior to the time of the latter monarch, the authority of the Austrian Emperors was absolute only in name; it was directed or restrained at every turn by a dominant aristocracy; and Joseph, with the same political sagacity as our Henry VII., endeavoured to neutralize their influence by creating a rival power to it in the people. The people, however, were not ripe in his day for a revolt under the imperial banner against their feudal oppressors, whose legislative veto was as conclusive as that of the tribunes of Rome; and the utmost that he could effect was to centralize in his own person the supreme administration of the state. This enabled him to do much for the amelioration and improvement of his subjects; but, unhappily, the same machinery which, in his hands, contributed so largely to the elevation of the masses, was equally available for their degradation in the hands of his successor. The policy which Francis pursued with ever-increasing vigour during a reign of more than forty years, is easily explained by the circumstances which signalized his accession. He ascended the throne in 1792, when the spirit of revolution was in the full fury of its terrible course, and his reign was inaugurated by a declaration of those principles of conservatism and reaction, which no defeat could compel him to abandon, no victory induce him to relax. His policy was not merely a policy of resistance, but of aggression, as it regarded his own subjects; and the co-operation of such discordant spirits in his service as Metternich and Kolowrat is a sufficient proof that he was in reality the master of both. His uncompromising obstinacy was alike deaf to necessity and reason; and Metternich had little more to do, while he lived, than to act as the exponent of his views and the executor of his designs. It has been justly remarked, that the reign of Prince Metternich only began on the day of his old master's death.

It is impossible to say what course Metternich would have chosen had the initiation of an administrative policy been left to him at first; but it is quite clear that he must in his heart have condemned the system in which it was his fate to be involved. He foretold its inevitable ruin, though he fondly hoped that it would last as long as himself. "After me-the deluge," he was wont to exclaim; and we cannot conceive that a man, who was haunted by such a melancholy

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conviction, would not have retraced his steps, if he could have done so with safety. When Francis died, it must be recollected that the Prince had been occupied for nearly a quarter of a century in forging fetters for his country, and that the heavier they became, the more terrible would be the rebound of the victims when liberated from their pressure. To stand still was impossible,-to recede would have been instant destruction; and he had, therefore, no choice but to postpone the catastrophe as a legacy for his successor. He never expected that the system would survive, and, indeed, after the French Revolution of 1830, the same ominous presentiment struck a panic into the heart of the old Emperor himself. He wandered about the castle of Schönbrun groaning "Alles ist verloren,"-all is lost; and for the last three years of his life trembled at the thought of signing a decree! And yet, the ruling passion for enslaving his people was strong in death. When his will was opened, it was found that he had left four hundred thousand florins for the re-establishment of the order of Jesuits throughout the empire.

The power of Metternich was now uncontrolled; and it is from this date that his undivided responsibility begins. Hitherto he had been only the unscrupulous minister of another's will; now he was to originate everything suo proprio motu. But, unfortunately, he was too deeply pledged to the old policy of repression to be a free agent in this crisis of his destiny. By his Machiavelian arts he had enslaved, not only his own country, but the whole German family. The Germanic Confederation, which had held out constitutional liberty to the people, was, under his auspices, perverted into a confederacy of sovereign powers to oppress them. If Hungary, or the Tyrol, were enfranchised, every state, from the Rhine to the frontiers of Russia would rise, and demand to participate in the boon. Thirtyfive princes were bound by a solemn covenant to assist each other in withholding from their subjects the liberty of free discussion, and the privilege of popular representation; and the slightest concession by the great head of that confederacy of potentates would be the signal for universal innovation. In fact, Metternich clearly saw that matters had been carried too far to admit of any endurable compro mise between the people and their rulers, and that reform, instead of conciliating the former, would only be the first step to a general revolution.

Under a different monarch, Prince Metternich would probably have been a very different statesman. No diplomatist has displayed in modern times more tact and address in accomplishing his object; but the utmost praise we can bestow upon him is, that few have surpassed him in executing the conceptions of his employer. Francis was a king who rarely consulted, and never trusted, any one. The functions of his servants were purely ministerial; and he seldom indulged them in the exercise of the higher prerogative of advisers. Under Joseph the Second, Prince Metternich would have been the ablest homme du progrès of his time, and even under the present Emperor Ferdinand, he might have been a conciliating reformer, if he had not found it impossible to abandon the system which he had been so long engaged in maturing to a fatal perfection. How strongly he felt the necessity of adhering to it is evident from the line of conduct he adopted respecting Francis's legacy to the Jesuits. Ferdinand, as well as the Archdukes Charles and John, detested the

Order, and the people, and the regular clergy also, held them in aversion. But Metternich, although there was very little bigotry in his composition, felt that the Jesuits would be of important service to the state policy, which had been persevered in so long that it was impracticable to substitute for it any other principle of government, without risking a convulsion; and, with the support of the empressmother, he compelled his reluctant sovereign to establish the brotherhood, in conformity with the will of his deceased parent. It was to them that he entrusted the education of the people, in the hope of their checking the liberal tendencies of the age, and counteracting the propagandism of liberty by the propagandism of superstition. He cared little, indeed, for the religious doctrines which they preached, and even went so far as to consent to their banishment from court; but the political doctrine of Divine right, which they drew as a corollary from obedience to God, as essential and indispensable to the popular endurance of a despotism, was the keystone of his policy. And hence, while the cabinet of Vienna repudiated all allegiance to Rome, the people of Austria were more roughly ridden by her priests than any other country in Europe, not excepting Ireland itself.

In short, it was the misfortune of Metternich, that in the early part of his career an arbitrary government was the only government which the head of the state would permit; and, in his later years, the only government which was possible without entirely revolutionizing the empire. The fetters, too, which it cost the prince years of deliberation, and debate, and intrigue, to rivet upon the communities of Germany, under the false pretences of binding them together in a bond of national unity, crippled his own motions as well as theirs, and the Austrian government was compelled to sacrifice the same popular attachment and support which it persuaded others to repudiate. It was a monstrous error, too, on the part of Metternich, to create a sympathy between the Austrian provinces and the German states, by subjecting them to a common oppression; for the latter were far more combustible than the former, and should the flames burst out in the one, they would be sure to extend to the other. When, by the final act of the Confederation, it was resolved that, "since the German Confederation consists of sovereign princes, it follows, from the very nature of the case, that the whole power of the state must remain undivided in the head of the state; and that no representative constitution can be allowed to bind the sovereign to the co-operation of the estates," when Austria succeeded in thus assimilating the condition of every German community to her own naked despotism, she procured thirty millions of allies for her own. discontented subjects at home. And yet she could not avoid this step; it had been rendered inevitable by the measures which had preceded it since the peace of 1815, and retreat became daily more difficult, until it was entirely out of the question. Metternich, in short, from the first day he entered into the service of Francis, was involved in a war against the natural tendency of things, and we have seen that he was himself sensible of the hopeless struggle in which was engaged.

It has been said, that the fallen statesman should have recognized in the final overthrow of Napoleon the advent of a critical epoch, and that, when he abandoned the obsolete fiction of the Hapsburghs