enemy of Italy, of progress, and of France. The Italian and French press applauded the "Piedmontese mission" of the Hohenzollerns, and cherished hopes of a "Germany united by means of a Prussian needle;" Napoleon himself was eager for a reconstructed Prussia as a Protestant rival to Catholic Austria, and a useful counterpoise to Russia. With that view he was eagerly encouraging Prussia to declare war, reserving to himself a policy of "attentive neutrality," convinced that whatever might be the fortune of the war, he could always interfere with effect in favour of peace and the equilibrium of Europe. On the other hand, Bismarck, who saw through this game, and was unwilling to embark in a war of which Napoleon could dictate the conclusion and the terms of peace, was anxious to obtain a written promise of absolute neutrality. This Bismarck failed to obtain. Napoleon was anxious that Italy should complete her unity, and that Prussia should afford her the opportunity of doing so, and he was ready to respect the national aspirations of Germany. He was equally willing to complete French unity, and was full of visionary schemes to promote the cause of progress and humanity. But no definite arrangement was made, either as to neutrality by France, or as to guarantees by Prussia in the improbable event of her issuing victorious from the strife. Under those circumstances the Prussian Minister felt that the blow must be struck, and struck quickly and decisively, before Napoleon had time to intervene.

The

marvel of the whole achievement was, that Count Bismarck, up to that time regarded as a sort of mad diplomatist, was able to carry the pious Hohenzollern into this fratricidal war, as all persons declared it, and,

with the aid of the comparatively inexperienced Moltké and Von Roon, strike down Austria in a week.

This war was by far the most perilous adventure to which the emotional mind of the Prussian King had ever been fixed. Bismarck knew that he risked death upon the scaffold in case of failure; only Napoleon would have traced any parallel between such an enterprise and the schemes of Count Cavour. There was no counterpart to Italian misrule to be found in the constitutional and republican States which formed the Bund, and which already boasted as much liberty and order as Prussia possessed or could possibly confer. They denounced beforehand the "fatal policy" of the Berlin Cabinet, and were the immediate victims of its success. Italy was Prussia's real ally in this business. A treaty had been concluded between the two countries in April 1866; and while the Prussian King appeared in the unwonted character of Victor Emmanuel's ally, the Hohenzollern as the patron of successful revolution and of Garibaldi's friend, the Prussian Minister was already in communication with Mazzini and the Magyar chiefs, determined, if the worst came to the worst, to fight his enemy with revolutions, and be ready, if France should intervene and Italy withdraw, to fall back on Hungarian legions and southern conspirators. The conquest of Germany, however, was achieved. It is clear that Prince Gortschakoff silently but effectively aided his friend, and probably no one rejoiced more heartily than he did at the discomfiture of Austria and the mortification of Napoleon. Italy at this time obtained possession of Venice, and a Hohenzollern prince assumed the government of Roumania; but neither by diplomacy

BECAUSE of the climate we so naturally abuse, there is no place like England for the pleasures of the country, rain and sunshine, snow and frost, bring out a world of beauties in an enchanting variety of landscape. There are lakes and streams that are swarming with fish, in spite of the growth of manufacturing industries; game abounds in field, fell, and wood, notwithstanding occasional indifference to preserving it; and a succession of invigorating sports falls in with the several seasons. It is no amour propre of patriotism that makes us believe that in these matters we are far better off than our neighbours; and indeed they are ready to acknowledge it themselves, by culti vating the tastes that are instincts with Englishmen. You have only to cross the Channel to be conscious at once of a change. There is as charming scenery among the orchards of Normandy as any to be found in the hop-gardens of Kent. The granite precipices of Penmark and the Pointe de Raz on the Breton coast are nearly as wild as anything in Devon or Cornwall. Where the Grand line of railway from Liège to Cologne is carried along the slopes of the valley of the Vesdre, you look down on meadows and rushing streams that remind you of the pastoral picturesqueness of Herefordshire. But everywhere you are struck by the sharp lines of demarcation that are drawn between the country and the towns. Here and there you may come upon an isolated château that looks as if it had been transplanted from some neighbouring boulevard, and then adapted to its rural site by being fitted with turrets and statues. If there is a park,

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it is shut in from plebeian intrusion by forbidding walls of stone; and the highest praise you can possibly bestow on such a place is, that there are turf and flower-beds that remind you of England. No thought of coveting it ever comes across your mind, except in so far as it may be the sign of an easy fortune. the contrary, you are inclined to pity the owner, and to wonder what in the world he does when he goes there. Doubtless he has the means of amusing himself indoors, so far as the cellar, salle-à-manger, and a billiard-room can help him. The ladies, in toilets of affected simplicity, may saunter on the terrace of an evening, and sip their coffee in a frescoed temple covered with creepers, looking down on the waterlilies in a formal fish-pond. But theirs, after all, is only the life of the town, with all that is dull in the country superadded. The brandnew stucco of the façade-that formidable wall, with its gilded grills and its bolted posterns-are disagreeably suggestive of antipathies of class, and the absence of those kindly feelings that are insensibly fostered in the course of generations by a neighbourly intercourse between the landlord and his people. The foreign proprietor cannot hunt, and there is little for him to shoot. The fields look all that is desirable for partridges, but they are cut up in infinitesimal patches among a society of jealous little owners, who would open full cry on their more wealthy neighbour if he followed a pack over their patrimonies. His woods are very attractive to the artist, but they have none of the undergrowth that shelters groundgame; and if he went in for pheasant-breeding, he would have to

friendship of the former was accepted, and General Manteuffel sent to negotiate the terms either of alliance or "understanding" which should subsist between Prussia and Russia. France was bamboozled, over-reached, and betrayed. "Dilatory negotiations," a new term in diplomacy, were prosecuted for her amusement, in which she betrayed to her implacable enemy that policy of "taking tips" (une politique de pour boire) which Bismarck scorned. If a Power which had ceased to take and had begun to give up, was deemed by him, rather hastily, to be an exhausted Power, what must have been his idea of a Power which, no longer able to take, stood hat in hand to a powerful rival vainly asking for its grateful acknowledgments? He was ready to sell it the bearskin, well knowing that it would fail to catch or kill the bear; but there his complaisance ended. He would not even allow it to purchase Luxembourg from the King of Holland. He tempted it with Belgium; took an authentic project of a treaty on the subject in M. Benedetti's handwriting, with Napoleon's marginal notes, into his possession: but no sooner was the Peace of Prague concluded with Austria than he was averse to "creating ill-feeling between Prussia and England," and in good time divulged the project to England and the world. But the secret treaty, or project of a treaty, relating to the Rhine, was at once laid before the Southern Confederate States, which, according to the preliminaries of Nikolsburg, were not to be included in the new Confederation governed by Prussia. The triumph of French mediation had been that they should form a restricted union amongst themselves, having solicited and obtained the French Emperor's help for that purpose. But no sooner did Count Bismarck

explain to them that so far from the Emperor protecting them, he was seeking an understanding with Prussia at their expense, than they gave way and concluded with him secret offensive and defensive treaties. These were kept rigorously secret; but from the date of the peace with Austria, Bismarck could rely on the armed co-operation of the whole of Germany, the silent aid of Russia, and the certainty of being able to destroy all hope of English interference. France knew that her alliance had been declined in favour of Russia; but it does not appear that she suspected the magnitude and completion of the precautions which Prussia was taking against her. "That powerful agent of civilisation and progress" which France had done so much to call into a vigorous life, was already plotting her destruction, to wrest from her the admitted supremacy in Europe. What may have been the exact terms of the arrangement which General Manteuffel was commissioned to make with Prince Gortschakoff is not known; but M. Klaczko's observations with regard to it are interesting, for the Eastern question must at all times be largely affected by any understanding between Germany and Russia. It was suspected that another bearskin was being disposed of on the banks of the Neva; but this time "it was a bear of the Balkhan, who had not felt well for some time past, and whom the Emperor Nicholas had declared to be very sick twenty years before."

And during the Eastern troubles both Austria and France made significant advances to the Court of St Petersburg. The French Cabinet was willing to reopen the whole Eastern question and pacify the East with heroic remedies. Count Beust could not refuse to sympathise with the Christians in Turkey, and to en

fortable class of gentlemen farmers. Here and there in the depths of the forest you come on the picturesque huts of the charcoal-burners or woodmen; now and again you stumble out upon a clearing with some sylvan lodge, the dwelling of the forester, whose duty is to keep an eye on them, and whom you have possibly come across in the course of the morning, with a dachshund or two at his heels. Generally, however, the people are huddled together, and each of the greater valleys has its village. Nothing can be more quaint than the many - gabled houses with their rustic woodwork interlaced through the rough lime walls, hanging along the slope in the single street that leads down to the little place, with the village inn and the posthouse. There is a pleasant odour of fresh hay and newly-milked cows; everybody seems in comfortable circumstances, and the local authorities look after the poor; but it is plain that they must labour hard to live, and that life shows its serious side to all of them. Not a man of them who does not place the summum bonum of recreation in a Sunday or saint's day that is celebrated by a free indulgence in beer and tobacco, or a longer chat on local politics. Naturally that marked feature is brought out conspicuously in those writers of the nation, who are the most keen to appreciate all that is most enchanting in the scenery of their respective countries. Our remarks on the Schwarzwald, though the results of a long familiarity with it, might have been borrowed almost verbatim from the pages of Hackländer, who narrates in his Pictures of Travel' the very excursion we have been imagining. Perhaps no French novelist of our own time or of any other, excelled more absolutely in delicate landscape - drawing than

George Sand, and at the same time she had made herself the unrivalled mistress of the subtle refinements of rustic character. Her whole heart went out in her writings; she made her enchanting studies either from memory or observation of scenes endeared to her by happy associations; and her dreams of the most perfect lot on earth were closely linked with a life in the country. In Flamarande,' one of her latest works, her love for nature is as fresh, and her pen as forcible, as in 'Le Meunier d'Engibault' or 'La Petite Fadette.' Yet even George Sand in her inimitable descriptions gives us the idea of an enthusiastic and emotional amateur looking at the beauties of nature through an æsthetic medium, as she might admire them on the canvas of a Corot or Jules Breton. You see the old château lost among the woods and rocks, tenanted now by the family of the farmer who has succeeded to its ancient lords. You see the lonely mill among the meadows and the water- courses, among osier - beds and clumps of the drooping alders and sedges, swarming with water-hen. You are wrought insensibly into easy sympathy with the hopes and hardships, the griefs and the joys, of the hard-working people who have their homes there. You are made to fancy that retreat among such soothing influences would be more tranquillising to the jaded spirit, and as satisfactory in the long-run, to the blasé hermit, as the gloom and asceticism of the medieval convent; and that even a short sojourn in summer would be no disagreeable variety to men and women of the world, though the fare might be simple and the post irregular. But the very longings with which you are inspired must arise from some passing impulse of misanthropy. You are to court solitude from an ephemeral passion for it, and you

don, Paris, and Vienna, to Roumania and Greece, the Cabinets of St Petersburg and Berlin maintained a continuous silence. "By a curious change in earthly matters which must have astonished the Nesselrodes and Kamptz in their celestial abode, the voices of the Western Powers-those of England, France, and Austria-were now denouncing the underhand and revolutionary proceedings of the European demagogues; while Prussia was silent, and Russia denied the fact, or pleaded extenuating circumstances." A conference was held in Paris; Turco-Grecian difficulties were smoothed over; but the universal belief remained that Russia would assume an offensive position in the East as soon as complications arose in the West. In 1869, Fuad Pacha on his deathbed addressed his last political testament to the Sultan, in which he pointed out the approaching inevitable conflict between France and Prussia, declared that the great Ottoman empire was in danger; and concluded, "an internal war in Europe, and a Bismarck in Russia, and the face of the globe would be changed."

The completion of Italian and Germanic unity brought no comfort to the Tuileries. M. Benedetti was the first to perceive the altered position of France; and M. Klaczko pays every honour to the insight and judgment which he displayed in the four years between Sadowa and the Franco-Prussian war. Grossly and painfully deceived as he had been during the negotiations which preceded the war with Austria, he constantly drew the attention of his Government to Count Bismarck's schemes; his propagandism beyond the Main; his intrigues with the revolutionary party in Italy, designed to aid him in fighting Victor Emmanuel as well

as Napoleon with revolutions in case of necessity; his negotiations with Russia through General Manteuffel; his intrigues with General Prim respecting a Hohenzollern candidate to the Spanish throne. Napoleon despatched General Fleury to the Court of Russia; and Bismarck's relations with his Hungarian allies of 1866 showed that he did not contemplate surrendering to Russia all German interests and claims on the shores of the Danube and at the foot of the Balkans. And at the Paris Conference in 1869, the views of the Berlin Cabinet diverged from those of Russia. Convinced that no definite solution could be arrived at without the aid of a united Germany, Count Bismarck Idid not wish in the then state of the Continent to commit himself with either the friends or the foes of the Sultan. The collapse neither of Turkey nor of Hungary would suit his views; and a struggle in the East might force him to borrow a card in the game of his Russian friend, a change of rôle to which he was at all times strongly opposed. Then, as now, Count Bismarck maintained his own liberty of action, resolved, however, not to pre-engage German forces in an Eastern crisis, but rather to reserve to himself the part which Napoleon ought to have played in the Prusso-Austrian war— the part of umpire of the contest, at whose word the combatants must separate and come to terms. Russian policy, it seems, was to wait; and when the power and public opinion of Europe were paralysed by the tremendous strife which was plainly imminent, to step in and seize its plunder. Prince Gortschakoff no more than the French Emperor dreaded the increase of Prussian power; and, like Napoleon in 1866, he never dreamed of the tremendous victories which Prussia was about to win. Bismarck had