THERE MARIA-THERESA. The bold Bavarian in a luckless hour, With unexpected legions bursts away, And sees defenceless realms receive his sway: Short sway! Fair Austria spreads her mournful charms; The Queen, the Beauty, sets the world in arms. From hill to hill the beacon's rousing blaze, Spreads wide the hope of plunder, and of praise: With all the sons of Ravage, crowd the war. DR. JOHNSON'S Vanity of Human Wishes. ПHERE is truth, if not transcendent poetry, in the above lines, which refer to the bandit-attack upon Austria, at the accession of Maria-Theresa, daughter of Charles VI., by Bavaria, Prussia, Spain, France, and Saxony, and the successful appeal, when all seemed lost, of the youthful Queen, to the Hungarian Magyars, whose chivalrous enthusiasm checked and rolled back the tide of victorious war that would else have erased Austria from the roll of sovereign states. With the antecedents and aims of that most unjustifiable of wars, Maria-Theresa was associated from her birth; and it will be necessary, therefore, to the appreciation of her eventful early life that these antecedents and aims be first passed briefly in review. Joseph, Emperor of Germany, and his brother and successor Charles VI., acting upon a suggestion of their father, Leopold, agreed that in the event of Charles dying without male issue, Joseph's daughters should succeed to the throne of Austria—that of Hungary, of Bohemia, Lombardy, and the Netherlands inclusive, to the exclusion of the daughters of Charles. This arrangement received the name of "The Family Compact," and was readily acquiesced in by Charles till the death of his only son, Leopold; soon after which event that monarch openly refused to be bound by it. He had two daughters by his consort, ElizabethChristina of Brunswick; the eldest of whom, Maria-TheresaValperga-Amelia-Christina, born at Vienna, on the 18th of May, 1717, was endowed with a royalty of nature, both mental and physical, that rebuked, as with a visible sign from God, the stipulations of a compact which, by depriving her of the succession to a sceptre, hers by hereditary right, annulled the laws, in virtue whereof that sceptre was wielded by the House of Hapsburgh. Enlightened by parental pride and affection as to the illegal tendency of the Family Compact, Charles exhausted every resource of diplomacy to set it definitively aside; not only because the high contracting parties had no power to dispose of the rights of others, but that in consequence of the alliances formed by Joseph's daughters-one of whom, Maria-Josepha, had married Augustus III. of Poland and Saxony; the other, Maria - Amelia, Albert, Elector of Bavaria,―it, to a certain extent, endangered the European equilibrium. All the great Powers of Europe ultimately acceded to those views, and the result was what is called "The Pragmatic Sanction," by which England, Holland, France, Prussia, and Spain, guaranteed the succession to Maria-Theresa, and bound themselves to support her right by arms if necessary. It was also provided that, in the event of Maria-Theresa previously dying childless, MariaAnn, described as an equally beautiful girl, but not so fitted for command as her sister, should upon the demise of Charles ascend the Austrian throne. Not one of the Powers that sanctioned, and bound themselves to enforce the Pragmatic Sanction-except England and Holland-was influenced by the motives ostensibly set forth for doing so. France, the traditionary foe of Austria, saw in the arrangement the rupture of the golden link of the imperial crown by which Germany had been so long united to the discordant nationalities governed by the Austrian sceptre. That crown, though an elective one, had been borne during four centuries by the Hapsburgh sovereigns, but there could be no Empress-Regnant of Germany: and although, so far, the same result would have been obtained by upholding the Family Compact, the substitution of Charles's daughters for those of Joseph ensured the hostility of Bavaria and Saxony. Frederick-William of Prussia was inspired by the same motive as France, and the Spanish monarch with better excuse associated himself with their views, Charles VI. having always refused to abandon his pretensions to the crown of Spain. The conspiracy consequently to dismember the Austrian dominions was sealed by the Pragmatic Sanction, and its attempted enforcement, upon the death of Charles, was but the carrying out of a long since foregone conclusion. The Archduchess Maria-Theresa, whose accession to power was to be the signal of attack, is described by Mr. Robinson, afterwards Lord Grantham, the English Ambassador at Vienna, in his despatch of the 5th July, 1735, to Lord Harrington, to be "no less esteemed for her spirit and talents than admired for her beauty and accomplishments." The figure of Maria-Theresa was tall and beautifully formedher complexion brilliant,-her hair of a golden brown, fine and abundant; she had the full Austrian lips; her mouth and smile were beautiful, her lustrous eyes full of expression, and her voice is described as inexpressibly sweet and musical. With all this, and although no one better than she, knew the effect of a woman's smile upon enthusiastic men, there was not a tinge of coquetry in Maria-Theresa; her religious convictions, which were profound and sincere, combining with her pride to shield her from that vice or weak ness. She was very early and profoundly impressed by the ominous shadows cast before of the perilous magnitude and grandeur of the mission to which, upon her father's death, she would be called. Charles VI., a monarch of slight capacity, and of so grave and melancholic a temperament, that he was rarely seen to smile, and it is said laughed outright but once in his life,-was one of the most luckless of rulers, ever at war, and unsuccessful war! Yet a compassionate-minded man; much better fitted for the quiet pursuits of a private station, than to sustain the cares of empire, and so passionately fond of and skilled in music, that he composed an opera, which was performed at the Court Theatre, the Emperor himself presiding in the orchestra, and his daughters, the archduchesses, dancing in the incidental ballet! He was a munificent patron of Metastasio, to whom he entrusted the cultivation of the Archduchess's taste in belles lettres,-a study less congenial to Maria Theresa than that of the history and traditions of the countries she was destined to govern. As soon as she attained her fourteenth year, the Emperor consented to her presence at the deliberations of his council, for a time, as a listener only,—an early initiation into the mysteries of statecraft, of which she so well availed herself that, after the death of Prince Eugène, he had confessedly no abler, more courageous adviser than she. With what might be called prophetic sagacity, the youthful Archduchess was the persistent advocate of the Hungarian privileges and immunities that had been unwisely trenched upon by preceding sovereigns, notably by Leopold,-and of which Charles himself was irritably jealous. To facilitate her intercourse with the magnates of that kingdom, she, resolutely conquering her aversion to the study of languages, acquired so perfect a knowledge of Latin as to speak it with admirable fluency; and it thus came to pass that, by tacit consent or arrangement, Hungarian affairs, remonstrances, petitions, and so on, were long before Charles's death referred to her for preliminary investigation, and as an inevitable consequence that the popularity of their future Queen took early and permanent root amongst the chivalrous Magyars. The magnanimous kindliness, so to speak, of Maria-Theresa, which, in after days, when age had dimmed the glory of her brilliant youth, and stolen away the grace and beauty to which it owed so much of its fascination, savoured somewhat of a stately formalism, was not, however, in the faintest degree sectional as regarded her future subjects. For all misfortunes she aimed at being a consoling providence. "One would suppose," exclaimed Charles, weary of the endless petitions of which she was the bearer and indefatigable advocate-“ one would suppose that the sole business of a monarch was to grant favours." "It is that alone which makes power precious," was Maria-Theresa's prompt reply,-words which the history of her life bears witness were the true expression of her mind and will;-"for, throughout her reign," remarks a by no means over-partial writer, "Maria-Theresa insisted upon being made acquainted with every act of administration, gave free access to her presence to the humble and the poor, |