The Press. — London, England, 1856-04-19 00:00:00

AP/m.19, 1856. Austrian an Seven kingdoms are governed by its ruling oynasty—via.,Hungary, Bohemia, Sl avo nia, Dalmatia , Galicia and Lodomia, Illy ria, Lombardy and Venice. The mere statement of those names attest the ascendancy of the " dark and deadly " principles of rule which brought together so many discordant nationalities. Then, again, the Archduchy of Austria, the Archpancipality of Transylvania. the Margravate of Moravia, the Duchies of Styria, Salzburg, and Carinthia, with the princely Earldoms of Tyrol and Giirz—these splendid appanages to the Austrian empire also hear witness to its extraordinary grasp of political power. Fur the history of such a monarchy, and fur the study of its resources, the stitesman's library is amply furnished. The various works of Von Licheustein, Heilzinger, De mian, and Rarer, will show that statistical science in all its branches is perfectly under stood at Vienna. Graffer's " Manual," Hassel's "Austria," Malchus's "Sates of Europe," and a variety of similar productions, give a copious stock of materials to anyone anxious to study Of Austrian system. Recollecting the large stores open to compilers (not to say ()ova psers) on Austrian politics, we expected much floe' these two volumes, excellent only in their print and paper. The preface at once betrays the bookmaker. It thus commences : The " Memoirs of the Court of Austria " are the English version of the corresponding part of the series published by Dr. E. Vehae wider the title of " History of the Gerinah outs since toe Reformation " The author, in speaking of the character which he wished to impart to his woik, qu tes the saying of Horace Walpole : " I am no historian ; Iraq ch iracters, I preserve anecdotes, which my supe riors, the historians, may enchase into their weighty annals, or pass over at their pleasure." The first question that suggests itself is, " who "is Dr. Vehse that selects Horace Walpole "as a model?" We k►►ow digt, Horace Walpole was the son of a Prime Minister, that he had access to the best and highest circles of his time, and that he had a near view of " The Court—Aristocracy, and Diplomacy "—of Eng land. But even with all his advantages the writings of the Twickenham Gossip are more amusing than authoritative. His asseitions always require corroboration, and in many places we hold his opinion as cheap as that of the " mit dating, misquoting" Sir Nat Wraxall. who is also cited as an authority (!) in this compilation before us. " The Castle of Otranto" was not the only romance that came from Walpole's vivacious pen; and we cannot have much faith in the narrative of one who professes to be his Germanised imitator. We recollect what Walpole himself has written of historians. " There are three kinds of history, "all glk ) d the original writers; full and amide "memoirs compiled from them, and from "manuscripts, with great exactness; and his " tories, elegantly written and arranged. The second step is indispensably necessary for "the third." Tried by these canons the work of Dr. Vehse does not come up to its preten -8.11 1 9. The tran s lat o r pompously enunciates its "authorities"—Count Klievenliiiller, Eliza beth Charlotte D u ch ess o f O r l eans , and Joseph Yon Hormayr, which will appear an odd con junction of names to those versed in Austrian annals. There is an admirable index to this work ; but where are the notes. the authenticating references, the justify• lug proofs? In this, as in other instances of foreign lit erary manu f acture , we ma y b e re minded of the saying of Abernethy on Ore- The new is not true, and the true is • m.t new." Yet it is not unlikely that this work may have a certain kind of success. There is a quantity of matter, good, bad, and indifferent, loosely pressed into its pages, and the variety of its li g h t reading may amuse idle readers. It has neither philosophic views nor profound thought, but it has the careless, superficial tone of that pamphleteering mode of dealing "ith facts which Voltaire introduced by his " Age of Louis XIV " The first volume, and tie larger portion of the second, may be die iiiis,4etlas mere compilation. Imt at the end of t e second there are a parcel of highly fla voured anecdote s whirl' have ociiied t" e,iuse it to be talked ab..nt in parts of ` r many. We are not surprised to read in the foreign prints that the author has been imprisoned fir the liberties taken by his pen, but we are rather perplexed to find his work introduced to the English public so elaborately. The style of these anecdotes, which occupy the last sixty pages of the second volume, may be judged by some specimens. Of their pre tensions to authenticity we shall speak after wards. Prince Metternich is thus intro duced : Count Clement Metternich was endowed with all that liveliness and exuberance of animal spirits which is the characteristic of the Rhenish race; and, besides, with a very fine figure. and a 'Jost pleasing countenance. In 1788, he went to the University of Strassburg, whither the tame of the celebrated professor of internatioi.al law, Koch, at that time attracted a great number of students from princely and noble families. Afterwards he continued what lie called his studies at Mentz; that is to say, he first h s annrenticeship with a lady who enjoyed political influence, Madame de Coudenhoven, the well-known fair friend of the spiritual Elector of Mayence, Count Erthal. Even at that time, old Prince Kaunitz spoke of young Metternich as of " a good, amiable young man, of the prettiest rerre, a perfect cavalier." Substantial knowledge Metternich not only never affected to possess, but, on the contrary, he hated and shunned it in others. The author then proceeds : lifetternich's first real diplomatic office was the post of Anstrian Minister at Dresden, which he entered upon in 1801. Here it was again two gallant " stateswomen," who initiated him in the mysteries of the gnat political world —the Russian Princess liagrAtio t, the grand-niece of the celebrated Potemkin ; and the Duchess Biron-Sagan, descended from the notorious favorite of the Czarina Ann. Anil he then calls upon Von Hormayr to contribute to his literary tattle. He pre tends that Prince Metternuth twaddled in the following style:— Hormayr states that Metternich, who, like Napoleon, was fond of bavardage, hail been very frank about his lealings with the fair sex; and he quotes the following remarkable conversation, which took place in 1822. " You see," Metternich said to him, " you act in your house just in the same way which I dislike in you so much in your conduct of business Zeal never does soy good. It spoils everything. In negotiations there is only one misfortune—not to succeed; and likewise in domestic affairs, only oue—eclat. Dissembling, temporising, tacking, trimming, are things you will never be able to do; you are always for neck-or-nothing measures, all your nature is thoroughly passionate. lint when your passion is not roused, you are merely a sleeping savant, with an imnieuse deal of knowledge. However, your talent is contradictory in itself: you are born to be a tribunes plebis. quite a splendid specimen of the breed ; and yet you are also born to be—Minister of Police at St.. Petersburg. Now just consider ; if I had wished to act as you do, where should I be? The Princess ( Eleonore) is destitute of every at traction ; but she has a great share of common sense, and I don't by any means disdain to consult with her about po• litical chances. when it is worth my while to do so. When we came to Dresden, we mutually vowed that we would inseparably keep to each other, but that we should each go our own way, without any restraint whatever. Thus of all the children of the Princess, Marie alone is mine. The beautiful Clementine, and Victor with his fine intellect, are Ditmonstier's ; all the world knows it—for the connec tion wiih him continued in Berlin." The translator, Franz Demmler, thinking (as %veil he might) that such a style of narrative would be rather too co'rse and free for the English public, tries to defend his author with the following note appended to the passage : Dr. Veh!e has inserted the rest of the passage in full, and accompanies these most extraordinary disclosures with the following footnote :—" However grievously such things .rate upon our feeling of propriety, yet no one who has in any way become acquainted with the very loose tone of our high society, can doubt the reality of these disclosures; and as to.the validity of Hormayr's evidence, he was certainly not the man who would invent such positive statements. His having made them public may be called indiscreet : but untrue they certainly are not. The indiscretion once committed, publicity may, perhaps, in future act as a corrective on the private life of those who, until now, have been "preened from public reprobation by the "Egis of cen sorship. That is only making the matter worse. The day is gone when any parties ventured to main twin in this country that the public press should be used for the punishment of private immorality. A literary Inquisition would not ire tolerated in a land which even recoils from the institution of a detective police for the ap• prehension of notorious criminals. We shall give a few more short specimens of this au thor's peculiar style. He says of a certain person (whose name we exclude) : His first wife died in 1F19,5 ; and shortly after, the Prince married a second time. The bride was Antonia von Ley. kain, daughter of a younger son of a family of postal upstarts. who had risen in the service of Prince Taxis. Her mother was a woman of very bad character, a singer and opera dancer named I:trefoils'. She had been for some , i.no the mistress of the Lazzamni King Ferdinand IV. of Naples; afler which she married Karon Ambnotins Leykam. otonia, the second danghter of this conple, was b.rn in MO; and her delicate beauty was universally acknowledged and admired. The marriage created an immense sensa• -------AIL THE PRESS. tion in the high world of Vienna. The news was too startling, that the prop of privileged excluaiveness, the pillar of the aristocracy of blood, should so far forget his old principles as to unite himself to such a pedigree. And again we are treated to the following style of writing:— This short idyl was. as Hormayr says, succeeded by the " Hellbreughel and Salvator Rosa" of his third marriage to Melanie Zichy ; the clever, bold, proud, passionate, voluptuously beautiful daughter of that notorious Hunga rian family to which more than one political traitor has owed his origin. She occupies a chapter of many pages in the chronique acandateuse of Vienna. She was immode- rately proud ; and, having long speculated on the and of the Prince, she felt not a little disgus•ed when he ga%e the preference to her humble friend Antonia. After Ler death, Melanie carried her point: she became Princess Rut her husband still had in his cabinet the portrait of Antonia dressed in a plain white robe, with a bunch of violets in her hand; and this picture faced his writing table, whilst the portrait of Melanie, in full dress, with • profusion of diamouds, was hung on the wall behind his chair. Melanie once, in the absence of the Prince, had the position of the pictures reversed; but they were soon restored to their old places. The insolence of the Princess manifested itself in its strongest light. on the occasion of the visit of the sons of Louis Philippe at Vienna. She refused to acknowledge them. When the French Am bassador remonstrated with -- about it, the Prince answered ; "Je n'ai pas fait Feducation de ma femme." At the risk of circulating matter the truth of which may be doubted (as stated in this gross style), and ou the treatment of which we dis approve, w e have extracted the foregoing pas sages. Our readers will perceive that the style of this latter portion of the performance is not unlike the revelations of certain extinct Sunday papers. We can supply them with a test by which they can measure the accuracy of this author and his translator. The late beautiful Lady Castlereagh (wife of Robert Stewart, second Marquis of Londonderry) is referred to in the fcllowing, manner : Nostitz is rather hard up3n the " English." " The English women," he says, " make us laugh at their strange attire. They are the Seven Sleepers, who now again (after the raising of the continental blockade) come forth from their secluded cavern to town, where they have become strangers. Lady Castlereagh is colossal and clumsy ; her dress always startling by the most ridiculous variety of tawdry and outré finery. Her manners are hoydenish and reckless ; always boisterous, and always chattering, she is the fun of the company, and is like mine hostess of the Congress." " Colossal and clumsy "—" hoydenish and reek " less "—" always boisterous." An author who inserts such descriptions, so remote (tom the truth, cannot meet with much credence. But the ignorance of the translator equals the impudence of the original. Dr. Vehse wrote that Nostitz was " hard upon the English," and cited his posthumous libel upon Lady Castlereagh, upon which the acute translator supplies the following note : The people on the Continent never distinguish between Sc“tch, and Insh, alt of whom they comprise under the general term of "English." The translator knew that Lord Castlereagh was " Irish," but he requires to be told that Lady Castlereagh was an Englishwoman—the Lady Emily Hobart, youngest daughter of Robert, second Earl of Buckinghamshire. We take for grouted that it was in order to meet the present demand fen• books upon Austria that this publication was issued in English by its eminent publishers But the book does not merit such distinction It is deficient in order; its authorities are not cited ; and it is little more than a collection of biographic ana upon people dead two centuries, and slipslop scandal, told in slipshod style, about notorieties of our time. We do not know that any description of persona in Eng land would approve that a literary man (say with an Aberdeen LL.D.) should compile a claptrap work, with scraps from the Satirist or Age, garnished with extracts from Hansard, and " original " tattle picked up in the low taverns frequented by discarded servants, and then call his farrage " The Court and Cabinets of England since the Battle of Waterloo, with Secret Memoirs of Living English Statesmen." It would not add to the value of such a work if it were issued in a translation at Paris, and sent into every capital of Europe to poison the stream of history, in the same way as the fabricated " Memoirs of Poncho," which even so generally trustworthy a writer as Sir Archibald Alison was lured into quoting as evidence, though the forger was tried and con victed under the French law, and severely punished for his fraud. Such a perfonl44oo