LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 485.-3 SEPTEMBER, 1853.

POETRY: A Spinning-Wheel Song-Youth, 577; Noontide, a Chant-Noontide, a Glee - Evening, 578.

SHORT ARTICLES: The Life of Haydon, 609; Post Office Return, 610; Papier-Maché Houses, 638; Musical Air, 639; Decimal Coinage - Another Challenge to Hobbs-Onions, 640. NEW BOOKS: Electric Science - Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks, 618.

From the Edinburgh Review.

Geschichte des Oestreichischen Hofs und Adels, und der Oestreichischen Diplomatie. (His tory of the Austrian Court, Nobility, and Diplomacy.) By Dr. EDWARD VERSE (forming part of a series of Histories of the German Courts since the Reformation.) Ten Parts. Hamburg: 1852.

A RECENT Swiss traveller describes a village in the Grison country, situated on the slope of a great mountain, of which the strata shelve in the direction of the place. Huge crags directly overhanging the village, and massy enough to sweep the whole of it into the torrent below, have become separated from the main body of the mountain in the course of ages by great fissures, and now scarcely adhere to it. When they give way, the village must perish; it is only a question of time, and the catastrophe may happen any day. For years past, engineers have been sent from time to time to measure the width of the fissures, and report them constantly increasing. The villagers for more than one generation have been fully aware of their danger; subscriptions have been once or twice opened in the cantons and in Germany to enable them to remove; yet they live on in their doomed dwellings from year to year, fortified against the ultimate certainty and daily probability of destruction by the common sentiment-things may last their time and longer.

lasting struggle of repression, as the Turks do on the yellow-haired Russians as those who are destined, sooner or later, to take away their place and nation. Their rules of conduct, their professed principles, even their favorite maxims -the alors comme alors of Kaunitz, the après nous le déluge of Metternich - all seem to indicate the thorough consciousness that what exists is provisional only, while to attempt to fashion the unknown future out of the present is but the hopeless task of a visionary. Yet the empire subsists meanwhile, and gives every now and then ample proof that its institutions, whatever their real strength may be, possess at least a superficial vigor and tenacity sufficient to repel outward invasion, and to reconsolidate the fabric after temporary shocks from within.

We do not mean to recommend the gossiping volumes before us as throwing any peculiar and direct light on these great questions of the day. But they form a compilation which the political inquirer will find useful no less than the antiquarian, and contain a world of anecdotic talk, industriously collected from all kinds of sources, trustworthy and otherwise, combined in German fashion with a very painstaking register of the official history of the Austrian monarchy; its succession of ministers, diplomatists, and pedigrees and vicissitudes of its noble families, from the reign of Maximilian down to the present time.

Unlike the fortunes of the other great It is needless to say how much of this European monarchies - those of Russia, popular fatalism is exhibited in the habitual Prussia, and Great Britain, showing a conacquiescence of modern society in the politi- stant and continuing increase of power; that cal institutions under which it lives. The of France a steady increase for centuries cracks and crevices in the mountain which followed by a stationary period — that of overhangs our old privilege-founded European Austria (separating her history as far as system are constantly sounded by explorers, possible from that of the Germanic Empire and their reports are never very reassuring; with which she was so long connected) exhibits we are more and more convinced of the inse- several remarkable alternations of advance curity of thrones and commonwealths, and and decline. The first military monarchy of political sagacity wholly fails to reveal to us Austria was that founded by Maximilian and the manner of their reconstruction. Yet we Charles the Fifth, which attained its height live on in a kind of provisional safety, recon- of power after the battle of Mühlberg in 1547. ciled to the constant neighborhood of dangers The lanzknechts of Maximilian, the Austrian against which, apparently, we can no better heavy cavalry, and the hussars" of Hungary guard ourselves than the villagers can pre- (first known by that name in Germany durvent the full of their rocks. And certainly ing the campaign of Mühlberg), had trino existing portion of that system more fre- umphed in turn over the French in Italy, the quently reminds us of the case of our Grison Turks in the East, and the Swabians and villagers, than the fabric of the Austrian Saxons at home. And the monarchy which Empire; an edifice raised by a succession of they upheld was, as it were, the first offspring accidents, on the surface of a mass destitute of the medieval chaos- briliant in youthful of all the ordinary political principles of strength, confident in its destinies, animated cohesion, and doomed for generations past, at once by the fire of old chivalry and modern by seers of all political sects, to speedy de- improvement. struction. Yet the fatalist principle seems to prevail there as elsewhere. Its statesmen live on, not as disbelieving in the destiny predicted to them, but as conscious of inability to escape from it. They look on the revolutionary enemies with whom they maintain their ever

But all its fair prospects were overcast by the political storms which arose from the Reformation. Charles the Fifth, in an evil hour for the immediate fortunes of himself and his race, had, after much wavering, cast his sword into the balance on the side of the

old religion. His hereditary subjects are still | Styria, kept Easter, 1596, at Gratz, he was under the strong influence of early Protestant- almost the only individual there who followed ism. The reigns of Ferdinand I., Maximilian the Catholic rite; the whole town had heII. (regarded by many as himself a secret come Protestant. A little more, and the Protestant), Rudolph II., and Matthias triumph of the Reformation would have been (1556-1619), were, regarded from a general complete from the Baltic to the Adriatic. point of view, nothing but a continued and Theological divisions, and the rapacity of unsuccessful struggle against religious and Protestant nobles, began its defeat; but few secular innovation. In that struggle the first secondary causes more contributed than the military monarchy of Austria was broken inflexible character of Ferdinand himself; down; the central authority reduced to the who never stinted until he had trampled it narrowest limits. Throughout her German out in blood in all the German provinces of provinces (not to mention the endless com- Austria. Its ebb was as rapid as its flow plication of Hungarian affairs), confederacies had been. Easter 1626, just thirty years of Lutheran nobles, burghers, and peasants after the time above mentioned, was apencroached with increasing boldness on the pointed by Ferdinand as the latest term at shrunken prerogatives of the crown. which Protestant worship could be tolerated in Upper Austria, its last stronghold. Eighty thousand peasants took up arms in their despair. Pappenheim, who suppressed their revolt, declared that even he, the ferocious soldier of the Thirty Years' War, "had never in his life seen such wild fury as that with which the Boors, singing psalms, or with the frightful war-cry,

Weil's gilt die Steel' und auch das Blut,

So geb' uns Gott den Heldenmuch, rushed on his cavalry, pulled them from their horses, and set on them with pikes, clubs, and morgensterns." The slaughtered peasants sleep under a green hillock on the shore of the Traun See; a few scattered mountain communes in the neighborhood still retain their faith; but, substantially, the " evangelical" cause perished with them in the Danubian provinces of Austria. Its fate in Bohemia is better known, being more connected with the leading events of European history. On that occasion, as on subsequent ones, the monarchy of the Hapsburgs was rescued from internal dissolution by the effort which it made to resist outward violence; by the encroachments of the Elector Palatine, the Catholic reaction which followed, and the Thirty Years' War. The reigns of Ferdinand II., and III. (1619-1657) comprise this period of flow in the fortunes of their house, and the establishment of what the historical student may regard as the second military monarchy of Austria, under the banners of Tilly, Wallenstein, and Piccolomini.

Many of our readers will remember how much light the German historian Ranke has recently thrown on that comparatively obscure and unnoticed field of history, the Protestant conversion and Catholic reconversion of Austria. Dr. Vehse's third and fourth volumes add ample anecdotic matter to the more general statements of that philosophical writer. He shows in detail the rapidity and heartiness with which the Austrian nobility and townsfolk, in the several German provinces, embraced the Reformation. Even among the peasantry the old religion found it difficult to hold its own against the ardent incursions of the reformed preachers. It is common enough to speak of unchangeable traits in national and local character. But the fact is, that great revolutions will in some rare cases as completely transform the character of a people in two or three generations, as if it had been exterminated, and a new one substituted for it. Those who best know what the population of Vienna now is, will find it the most difficult to realize the fact, that the ancestors of her burghers of the present day were those who went out, by tens of thousands, an armed civic militia, to listen to the sermons of the Calvinist Opitz, and who plunged into the Flacian controversy on "irreversible decrees" with all the zeal of a Scottish hill congregation. The change from what the fathers were to what the children have since become, was wrought in a few years by the determined, uncompromising, root-and-branch industry of the Jesuits. About the merits of that change It was an era of almost unequalled misery men will never be agreed, until it is settled to a large portion of Christendom. It seemed whether Thought, with its concomitant con- as if the ordinary restraints of civilized wartroversial turbulence, be or be not better than fare had become obsolete, and the combatants thoughtlessness, dividing its leisure hours were bent on destroying all that neither could between superstition and dissipation. finally wrest from the other. The populous North became a desert; we can scarcely believe, what some writers seriously allege, that the whole population of Germany, East of the Rhine, sank during the Thirty Years' War from sixteen to four millions; but never had any Christian kingdom presented such an aspect

At the end of the sixteenth century it was said that in all Austria Proper only five noble landed families, in Carinthia seven, in Styria one, remained Catholic, or, according to Hormayr, in all the hereditary states only thirty. When Ferdinand II., then Duke of

of desolation, since the age of the Huns. among the names which underwent this fiery We read of cultivated provinces relapsing into re-baptism, the heads of both having once forest; cities which had shrunken until the been Lutheran. But the greater portion are houses of whole deserted quarters were burnt sprung from new men -men who rose, in the for fire-wood by the scanty inhabitants of the troublesome times, from the ranks of the lower remainder. Men began, in their despair, to gentry by acquiring confiscated propertycease from those common labors on which the strangers from various parts of Europe, folmaintenance of society depends. To the lowers of the Austrian court and camp. Thus, starving remnant of mankind which listened in Bohemia alone, we find the houses of Colto the trumpeters proclaiming the peace of loredo, Piccolomini, Gallas, Isolani, derived Westphalia, the name of peace was almost from Italy; Maradas and Verdugo, from unknown except in their prayers, but it con- Spain; Bucquoy, from the Netherlands; many veyed the idea of blessings for which they from different German states. The history of were only too ready to sacrifice, not only the the greater family of Schwarzenberg presents independence for which their fathers had a singular instance of postliminium. They striven, but the customary rights of earlier are originally Bohemian; their Sclavish name generations. Accordingly, resistance to the is Czernahora. Driven out by the Hussites implacable reaction conducted by the Jesuits, in the fifteenth century, they settled in Franwas impossible alike in church and state. conia, and after various migrations returned Not only was the spirit of opposition extin- to their own country in the Thirty Years' guished, but all that was powerful and distin- War, to obtain an enormous share of the rebel guished among the recalcitrants was extir- confiscations. So at least says Dr. Vehse. pated. The princes of the House of Hapsburg, after the peace of Westphalia, reigned over a new country, a new aristocracy, church, and army.

Against the nobility, in particular, the watchword of the counter-reformation was indeed"Thorough." The old families of Austria, Styria, Bohemia, and Moravia, became almost extinct. The great majority, as we have seen, were Lutherans; and, apparently, were either not to be won back to the Church, or conversion was not enough to save them. The really old Austrian names those of the indigenous chivalry of the Danubian valley Kühnring, Eytring, Thonradtel, Hoffinann, Hofkirchen, Bucheim, Stein von Schwartzenau - appear no more from that time in history. The neighboring counties soon became full of exiles, who had made their way out of political or religious persecutions with such property as they could save from the wreck. Friedrich von Roggendorf, one of the family of the hereditary High Stewards of Austria, was promised "mercy" by Ferdinand, if he would return home. "Which mercy?" he asked. - "Bohemian mercy?—Head off. Moravian? — Imprisonment for life. Austrian? Confiscation."

We believe the family genealogists make out a Franconian origin, and discourse of certain kings of the Allemanni. But family trees, says the cynical antiquary, Baron Hormayr, grow in Austria like poplars.

To complete this brief sketch of Austrian noblesse, we may add that, according to our author, their titles of nobility are very modern. The first Austrian prince was a Lichtenstein (1608); and few, if any, existing titles of Count, seem to have an earlier origin.

We have entered at some length into this chapter of pedigrees, because, in truth, the anti-national character of much of the Austrian nobility, its modern and superficial connection with the soil, seem to have been among the causes which have prevented its combination for national purposes, and placed it, wealthy and numerous as it is, and great as its privileges once were, in close dependence on the court, ever since the peace of Westphalia. Thus the new monarchy of the latter Hapsburgs much more nearly approached the character of despotism (except in Hungary, the history of which is throughout to be viewed apart) than that of Charles V. It was moderated rather by the inherent weakness of the central authority, the inert strength of local usages and local corporations, than by any spirit of independence existing either among nobles or people. Such as it was, its culminating period was short; its decay, like that of the imperial race itself, slow but unchecked.

Hence a greater change took place in the proprietary body of the German-Austrian provinces, in the seventeenth century, than has been the case in any other modern state except Ireland. Their present land nobility may be regarded, like that of Ireland, as in great measure a body established in its The reigns of Leopold I., Joseph I., and estates by conquest, and enriched by confisca- Charles VI. (1657-1740), comprise this latter tion. Few comparatively are descended from period-the last age of the male line of the the small minority which remained Catholic Hapsburgs-which may, on the whole, be throughout that of the Princes Lobkowitz, regarded as one of progressive decline. The we believe, is among the number. The an- Jesuits remained all powerful through most. cestors of some were re-converted from Prot-of it; but their rule had lost its energy for estantism; Lichtenstein and Esterhazy are lack of serious opposition; the spiritual man-