Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/229

216 The old man had then eleven years more to live: and he managed to do a good deal more mischief yet. At first, there was nothing for it but flight. The next morning he was escorted by a troop of soldiers to the railway, and then for a time the world lost sight of Prince Metternich. He wandered about for a few weeks, and came to England for the third time, under the name of Meyer, a travelling merchant. He lived here and in Belgium for two or three years, and then ventured home. He was the proprietor of the Johannisberg vineyards on the Rhine, and his country-house there was a favourite residence. There he now settled, sending abroad accounts of his helplessness from age and infirmity. The world let him alone; but it was perfectly aware that he and the Archduchess Sophia, the young Emperor’s mother, were still working away at their system, as pertinaciously as ever. While blaming the Pope for his early reforms, and making out that everybody was wrong but themselves, they seem never to have asked themselves why the Austrian empire was not better fused, organised, and tranquillized. Italy was breaking away in one direction, and Hungary in another; and Vienna itself had, for once, defied even the police, and taken its own way.

Happen what might, there sat Metternich to the last,—apparently sunning himself among his vineyards, and seeing heaven and earth reflected in the Rhine before his windows; but, in reality, pulling the strings of his puppets as devotedly as before the miserable day when he had found them immoveable.

All this time matters were growing worse and worse. Of course he pitied himself for having fallen on evil days when the pride of mankind prevented their appreciating a great statesman, who governed them for their good: but mankind grew no better, in spite of the Concordat, and the tight rein held over Hungary, and the military occupation of Lombardy, and the sarcasms and rebukes and insults administered to Piedmont. At this time last year it was becoming plain that Austria must incur the inconvenient expense of sweeping her enemies from before her face. Her great military system must now be put in action to punish the troublers of order, who had only themselves to thank for their destruction. As the spring came on, the earth shook with the tread of Austrian armies. The system was to assert itself finally, to humble Piedmont, and rebuke all revolution in the person of France.

On the 4th of June was fought the Battle of Magenta, and on the 11th of the same month died Prince Metternich.

It is impossible to help compassionating such a close of such a career; but it is right also to rejoice in such a collapse of such a function. The age for Prince-Ministers is over with Metternich in Europe, as the age of Cardinal-Ministers was over with Wolsey in England. No scheme of rule can henceforth be instituted, or long upheld, which does not carry with it the respect and acquiescence of the best minds which live under it. It is no longer a question what Metternich declares to be the best system, if society is not of the same opinion; and ministers who desire power to do their duty must obtain it from the only source which is not fast running dry,—the consent of the governed. So evident is this, that the rankest despotisms now affect to rest on popular support as the only reprieve from destruction. It is against the laws of nature that, in an age of intelligence, one man’s will should overbear that of nations, be he minister or sovereign. To be a minister is to be a servant: and ministers will henceforth be kept to their function. They may never again have the chance of immortalising themselves—for honour or for infamy—by devising out of their own heads a national or European policy; but they will always be secure of respect, confidence, gratitude, and a cordial understanding with the national mind and heart, if they govern well enough to govern long. The follies and the fate of Prince Metternich mark the close of a period in political history; and the clearness of the warning, shown in the overthrow of a continental policy, and the crumbling of an ancient empire, is the only thing that can reconcile us to the calamity of the life and rule of Clement Wenceslas Nepomuk Lothaire, Prince Metternich of Austria. .

a man has more than his usual number of letters of a morning, and leisure to play with them, it is observable what flirtations he indulges himself in, ere he finally makes them unbosom themselves. Now he toys with them, scrutinises one after another, and guesses whom they can be from. Sometimes a handwriting that he dreamily remembers calls to him, as it were, from the envelope. Such a letter, deeply bordered with black, at once attracted my attention among the heap that lay upon my table. Whom could it be from? It was evidently a messenger of affliction; but how could that affect an old bachelor with neither chick nor child? I tore the white weeping willow upon a black background, that formed the device upon the seal, and read the contents. Nothing more than an intimation from a relative (perhaps once more intimate than now), of the sudden death of her brother-in-law, and a request that, under the circumstances of the sudden bereavement of the widow, I would undertake certain sad commissions relative to the mourning and monument which she entrusted to my care.

It is noteworthy that even in the deepest affliction, especially among women, in the matter of dress how the very abandonment of grief is shot, as it were, with the more cheerful love of the becoming; and in this instance I found no departure from the general rule, as I was particularly enjoined, in the most decent terms that the writer could command under the circumstances, to do my sad spiriting at a certain maison de deuil mentioned. Of course the term was not absolutely new to me, but I had never realised its exact meaning, or imagined with what exquisite delicacy and refinement those establishments had