ease and darkness, what can an Editor do!



Chapter II.

AUSTRIAN AFFAIRS ARE ON THE MOUNTING HAND.

Austrian affairs are not now in their nadir-point; a long while now
since they passed that. Austria, to all appearance dead, started
up, and began to strike for herself, with some success, the instant
Walpole's SOUP-ROYAL (that first 200,000 pounds, followed since by
abundance more) got to her lips. Touched her poor pale lips;
and went tingling through her, like life and fiery elasticity, out
of death by inanition! Cardinal moment, which History knows, but
can never date, except vaguely, some time in 1741; among the last
acts of judicious Walpole.

Austria, thanks to its own Khevenhullers and its English guineas,
was already rising in various quarters: and now when the Prussian
Affair is settled, Austria springs up everywhere like an elastic
body with the pressure taken from it; mounts steadily, month after
month, in practical success, and in height of humor in a still
higher ratio. And in the course of the next Two Years rises to a
great height indeed. Here--snatched, who knows with what
difficulty, from that shoreless bottomless slough of an Austrian-
Succession War, deservedly forgotten, and avoided by extant
mankind--are some of the more essential phenomena, which Friedrich
had to witness in those months. To witness, to scan with such
intense interest,--rightly, at his peril;--and to interpret as