come to l'Autriche triche (Austria tricks or
cheats).

All which are slanders, as false as the calumny
that old men have grey beards, are weak in the
hams, and have sometimes a plentiful lack of
wit. Oestreich never tricks or cheats; no, never.
If she steadily consults her own private interests,
people have no right, on that account, to call
her selfish; and if she chooses to stick to a
peculiar line of policy, what necessary connexion is
there between that and ingratitude? She carries
out a much pleasanter system of increasing her
territory than by the vulgar mode of military
conquest. Sheepskins can be turned to better
account, than to furnish drum-heads; a few
strokes of the pen have greater force and
more permanent effect than a very great
many strokes of the drumstick. Treaties and
contracts are the tools to work with; above
all, marriage contracts. Hence the famous
epigram:

Bella gerant alii; tu, felix Austria, nube;
Nam, quæ Mars aliis, dat tibi regna Venus.

Let others wage war; do thou, O fortunate Austria,
marry;
For the kingdoms which Mars procures for others,
will come to thee as the gifts of Venus.

But for the requirements of the pentameter
verse, it should have been Hymen Lucrificus
instead of Venus; the profits of wedlock have
more to do with the matter than the arrows of
love. The House of Hapsburg has always had
an excusable fondness for heiresses, especially
for damsels who happen to carry a crown in
their porte-monnaie. The matrimonial system of
aggression is stealthy and safe. For instance,
there are a lot of desirable compact estates
lying in ring-fences, each with a good family
mansion on it, with wood and water, shooting
and fishing, and a pleasant variety of manorial
rights, flotson and jetson, and treasure-trove.
These very eligible estates are comprised within
a general boundary, which has been compared by
auctioneers to the shape of a boot. All it wants
is one good leg to fit it. Says Oestreich, "We
will provide it provisionally with an assortment
of leglings. You, Cousin Ludwig, will go and
espouse the proprietress of estate Number Seven;
your sister Adelheid will have no objection to
take the heir of Number Four for better and for
worse. Uncle Fritz, with a party of his promising
boys, will look after the interests of the
decrepid old gentleman, whom we won't allow
any one to impose upon, except ourselves; and
Aunt Rhadegunde will act as dry-nurse and
housekeeper to the Babes in the Wood ticketed
Number Five. Other numbers will be cared
for, as occasion offers. Little by little we shall
have obtained a footing over the whole of the
area of the boot; and then (perhaps before that
time) woe betide the man who dares to cross our
path!"

One of Lord Chesterfield's fundamental rules
of conduct, was, that everything should be done
"suaviter in modo, fortiter in re," with suavity
of manner and with determined resolution; you
were to draw it mild, though you drew it by
bucketfuls. The Austrians have long adopted
the maxim, only the two divisions of the text on
which the courtly peer preached so ably—and
which he separated merely by a comma, or at
most by a semicolon—have been torn far asunder
by the Eastern Realmers, and parted by a wide
interval of time and space. The "suaviter in
modo" is here, the "fortiter in re" is there.
Between them lies all that tract of land which
stretches from Vienna—call it rather, with the
savages and "-esses," Wien, pronouncing Veen
—from Wien to Northern Italy; all the lapse of
time from the date of Lord Cowley's most sweet
reception to that of the pitching of the ultimatum
into Piedmont.

The upper few hundred of the Oestreichers
modestly style themselves "the cream of the cream;"
this merely means that they have risen to the
top. Their private as well as their official
conduct is so exemplary that the mind cannot admit
any allusion to scum. It was in the midst of this
dulcet cream, whipped up to frothiest syllabub,
that our officious minister spent his Wieny nights
and days, in a continuous succession of imperial,
archducal, archduchessy, and countly, dinners,
soirées, receptions, and conferences. Lookers
on, studying the game, clearly saw that there
were really too many dinners, too many
archduchesses, and too much suaviter in modo. The
non-official envoy put you in mind of a fly who
has entered a confectioner's shop, but whose
exit is quite impossible except by favour and
caprice of the confectioner and his shopmaids.
The Creamites had no interest in retaining their
visitor as a permanent guest, and so they helped
him to unglue his gauzy wings, to disengage
his silk-hosed legs, and to buzz home again,
delighted with the milk of Austrian kindness,
and confident in assurances of high and
distinguished consideration. His mission would
have succeeded perfectly, had it not been
previously settled that it should not succeed. If
the cream of Wien dimpled a little beneath, not
on, its oily surface when the diplomatic fly took
his departure, it is to be supposed that the parting
guest so agreeably sped, was out of earshot
of the well-bred laugh.

The next scene, shifted considerably to the
south-west, is made up entirely of "fortiter in
re," coming it strong in a variety of ways. Here,
instead of smooth speech and smiling
countenances, there is a versatility of rapacity, of
insolence, of destructiveness, displayed by white-
uniformed actors who have experienced the
scanty pay which is sung of in The Châlet. They
have crossed the Ticino, and are come to trample
down all before them, to crush, to blast, fortiter
in re. Pity, humanity, respect for inoffensive
individuals, for constituted authority, there is
none. That would savour too much of suaviter
in modo to suit this locality. Details of the
white-uniform proceedings are to be taken with
some reserve of course; but we all know what
they were in Italy, without provocation and in
time of peace, and on the stupidity and insolence
of Austrian oppression then, we are justified in