The Austrians must be amused by the change that has come over the
English mind; but with their sense of the satire which that change may
be said to embody, there is possibly mingled the reflection that their
case, bad as it is, is not so bad as to deprive them of hope. Looking
back over the history of the house of Austria, there is much in it to
allow the belief that possibly it may again rise to the highest place in
Europe. That house has often fallen quite as low as we have seen it
fall, and yet it has not passed away, but has renewed its life and
strength, and has taken high part in effecting the punishment, and even
the destruction, of those who might have destroyed it. When Matthias
Corvinus held Vienna,--when that city was besieged by the great Solyman,
whose troops marched as far to the west as Ratisbon,--when Charles V.
fled before Maurice of Saxony, "lest he might one fine morning be seized
in his bed,"--when Andrew Thonradtel took Ferdinand II. by the buttons
of his doublet, and said, "Nandel, give in, thou must sign" (a paper
containing the articles of the union of the Austrian Estates with the
Bohemians, which Ferdinand refused to sign, and never signed),--when
Gustavus Adolphus was beating or baffling all the Imperial
generals,--when Wallenstein was directing his army of _condottieri_,
with which he had saved the Austrian house, against that house,--when
Kara Mustapha, at the head of two hundred thousand Turks, aided by the
Hungarians, and encouraged by the French, laid siege to Vienna, and sent
his light cavalry to the banks of the Inn, and came wellnigh succeeding
in his undertaking, and would have done so but for the coming in of John
Sobieski and his Poles,--when the French and Bavarians, in 1704, had
brought the Empire to the brink of destruction, so that it could be
saved only through the combined exertions of such men as Eugene and
Marlborough,--when almost all Continental Europe that was possessed of
power directed that power against the Imperial house immediately after
the death of Charles VI.
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