to him, that "as there had been no recruiting since the peace, several companies were not more than forty strong. The army was not clothed: their tents and field equipments were quite ruined. But what they most needed was good officers and talented generals. The best officers had left the service in disgust, because young fellows were put over their heads who had lounged about the court for a few years as officers of the Guards."

Unfortunately, the Turkish army was in a, if possible, worse condition, and the king knew Catherine's character sufficiently well to feel that she would spare no sacrifices to gain the victory. If Russia gained any territorial increase, it was a bad prospect for Prussia. As the king himself writes: "La Prusse avait à craindre que son alliée, devenue trop puissante, ne voulût avec le temps lui imposer des lois, comme à la Pologne. Cette perspective était aussi dangereuse qu'effrayante." Hence Frederick did all in his power to prevent the war, but it was of no avail: the French ambassador at Stamboul, St. Priest, stirred the Sultan to action; while, on the other hand, Catherine was decided on war. Under these circumstances, and seeing that Austria was collecting a powerful force to prevent the advance of the Russians, Frederick hit on a scheme which would satisfy all parties, and place him in a secure position. This was nothing else than the partition of Poland, to which Panin had referred five years before. He wished Austria to aid Russia against the Turks, and receive in return the town of Leopol, while Polish Prussia would fall to his share, and Russia would take that portion which suited her best. In this way, all causes of jealousy being removed, Austria and Prussia would then help in expelling the Turks, and all could be amicably settled. To this proposition, Panin replied that Russia was quite willing to join with the two powers in expelling the Turks, and would gladly grant Prussia a compensation in Poland, and Austria in Turkey. Her own views were certainly disinterested, however; the empress could hardly govern the wide territory she already possessed, and had no desire for any augmentation. Of course, such a declaration, at the moment when Russia was clutching at the Bosphorus, rendered Frederick only the more suspicious, and he decided on observing more closely the bond of union with Austria.

Before long Frederick and Joseph II. had an interview, in which the young man declared that he would never allow Russia to occupy the Principalities, and the King of Prussia was enabled to watch the progress of the Russian arms with greater equanimity. Most amusing is the letter of congratulation old Voltaire wrote to Catherine, as the following excerpt will prove :

Votre Majesté Impériale me rend la vie en tuant les Turcs. La lettre dont Elle m'honore du 22 Septembre me fait sauter de mon lit, en criant: Allah Catharina! J'avais donc raison, j'étais plus prophète que Mahomet: Dieu et Vos troupes victorieuses m'avaient donc exaucé quand je chantais: Te Catharinam laudamus. Te dominam confitemur. L'ange Gabriel m'avait donc instruit de la déroute entière de l'armée ottomane, de la prise de Choczim, et m'avait montré du doigt le chemin de Yassi. Je suis réellement, Madame, au comble de la joie je suis enchanté: je Vous remercie.

In 1770 the Porte expressed a desire for peace, and begged Frederick to act as intermediary, which he very readily did for the sake of saving

VOL. XLVI.

Y

his darling thalers. But the conditions Catherine demanded were impossible, and Frederick had another interview with Joseph II. on the subject of his apprehensions. It was absolutely necessary the two German powers should form a close union "to check the swollen stream that threatened to inundate the whole of Europe." Both monarchs, therefore, urged Catherine to make peace, but it was of no avail, and Frederick was almost in despair, when a sudden change took place, which afforded him a prospect of ample compensation. The Austrians occupied a portion of Poland in 1771, and the partition was decided on. Catherine spoke very plainly to Prince Henry of Prussia on the subject so soon as the news of the Austrian occupation arrived at Petersburg, and urged that Frederick should take his share at once, before it was all swallowed up. In writing to his brother, the prince remarks: "Quoique cela n'était qu'un discours de plaisanterie, il est certain que cela n'était pas pour rien, et je ne doute pas qu'il sera très-possible que vous profitiez de cette occasion."

Frederick saw that the time had arrived, and he immediately put forward his claim to that portion of Poland which he thought necessary for the protection of his states. But an unexpected obstacle was found in the court of Austria, which would not consent to the portion. We know now that Maria Theresa was strongly opposed to it, and, at length, only reluctantly yielded to the arguments of Kaunitz. Michiels tells us that on the deed to which she affixed her signature in adhesion, the empress wrote the following protest: "I ratify the treaty, as so many superior and wise men desire it; but when I have been dead for a long time, the consequences will be seen of a usurpation which wounds every principle regarded as sacred and just." But before Austria consented to the partition, she attempted every possible intrigue to prevent her new allies in iniquity profiting by the division. At one moment she massed troops in Hungary, as if prepared to defend Poland against the new invaders; at another, her internuncio at Constantinople tried to form a secret treaty with the Porte, by which Austria promised to restore him his territory as he held it before the war, in consideration of ten million piastres.

But it was all of no avail: Austria had started on the path of wrongdoing, and the other two powers were resolved on having their share of the spoil. Frederick, as usual, suggested a scheme by which to keep Austria quiet. He writes to Solms: "Supposé que les Autrichiens trouvassent leur portion en Pologne trop faible en comparaison de la nôtre, et qu'on voulût les satisfaire, il n'y aurait qu'à leur offrir cette lisière de l'Etat de Venise qui les coupe de Trieste, pour les mettre en repos, et quand même ils feraient les méchants, je vous réponds sur ma tête que notre union bien constituée avec la Russie les fera passer par tout ce que nous voudrons." We see, from this instance, that the cool way in which Lombardy was recently tossed from one emperor to another, was no novelty in diplomacy.

The great hitch in the business was, however, the future destiny of the Danubian Principalities. Catherine had proposed that they should be independent, but to this Austria objected, for that court considered that any weakening of Turkey must be avoided, while the separation of the Principalities would only allow Russia to exert a decided influence *Secret History of the Austrian Government. London: Chapman and Hall.

1859.

over them. We almost fancy we are writing of the Crimean war, when we find that a hundred years ago the same apprehensions were entertained as to the spread of Russian influence in Eastern Europe. At length, Frederick induced Catherine to give way, and she consented to restore the Principalities to Turkey, and only demanded a pecuniary compensation. This caused universal joy in Vienna. Frederick writes: "On vit pour la première fois paraître le Prince Kaunitz avec un visage serein: son astuce et son orgueil s'humanisèrent, les esprits se calmèrent, et l'inquiétude et la jalousie que les grands succès des Russes avaient données a la Cour Impériale disparurent du moment qu'elle n'eut plus à craindre d'avoir cette puissance pour voisine de ses états."

In January, 1772, Kaunitz consented to the partition, and the fate of Poland was decided.

We think we have shown, then, that Frederick has been unjustly accused of having suggested the spoliation, although we are afraid we cannot acquit him of taking his share very readily. In the words of Cowper:

He blamed and protested, but joined in the plan,
He shared in the plunder, but pitied the man.

The worst was that, having once joined Russia in such an act of spoliation, Prussia could never interfere afterwards, but allowed her to carry on her ambitious schemes almost without a protest. From that period Russia had an accomplice whom she has ever since kept bound hand and foot to her interests.

A DECADE OF ITALIAN WOMEN.*

PREVIOUS works have amply proved Mr. Trollope's peculiar qualifications for undertaking one like the present, so rarely conversant has he shown himself, in repeated and diversified instances, with Italian history and literature, life and character, customs and manners. To habits of diligent inquiry he unites a reflective turn of mind, and a resolve of seeing things with his own eyes, and judging them by his own lights, laughing at whatever he thinks ludicrous in them, and exposing, without any daintiness of reserve, what he takes to be hollow and fallacious, mischievous or effete. Not incapable of hero and heroine-worship, neither is he inexpert at iconoclasm. Hearty in his admirations, when once they are fairly evoked, he is also addicted to irony in no dribbling measure, but can deal it out wholesale when occasion requires, on Pope or Kaisar, Guelf or Ghibelin, princess or podesta, statesman or saint.

Mr. Trollope regards the degree in which any social system has succeeded in ascertaining woman's proper position, and in putting her into it, as a very accurate test of the progress it has made in civilisation. And there are not wanting, he thinks, in the great storehouse of history,

* A Decade of Italian Women. By T. Adolphus Trollope, Author of "The Girlhood of Catherine de' Medici." Two Vols. London: Chapman and Hall. 1859.

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certain periods, individuals, and manifestations of social life, which may be cited in favour of the notion, that better things have been, as regards woman's position and possibilities, than are now. "There are, painted on the slides of Mnemosyne's magic lanthorn," as he expresses it, certain brilliant and captivating figures, which are apt to lead those who are disgusted with the smoke and reek of the Phoenix-burning going on around them, to suppose that the social conditions which produced such, may have been less far from the true path than our present selves. Nay, more. There have been constellations of such stars, quite sufficiently numerous to justify the conclusion, that the circumstances of the time at which they appeared were in their nature calculated to produce them.

We must refer to Mr. Trollope's own pages those who would see how he disposes of the question which remains, whether these brilliant types of womanhood, so attractive as subjects of study, and so curiously illustrative of the social history of their times, are on the whole such as should lead us to conclude, that the true path of progress would be found to lead towards social conditions of a kind likely to reproduce them. Not unnoticed, however, must be his disavowal of all intention to dogmatise, or even indulge in speculations on "the woman's question." On the contrary, in endeavouring to set before the reader what he calls his little cabinet of types of womanhood, he has abstained from all attempt at pointing any moral of the sort. The wish to do so, he justly enough asserts, is too dangerously apt to lead one to assimilate one's portrait less carefully to the original than to a pattern figure conceived for the purpose of illustrating a theory.

Reckoning from the birth of the first fair one in his Decade to the decease of the tenth, four centuries and a half are comprised in these Memoirs St. Catherine of Siena being born in 1347, when Petrarch and Boccacio were writing, and Dante had recently written,-and La Corilla, who closes the procession, having died in 1800, which year is not even yet, we believe, an unquestioned perquisite of either the eighteenth or nineteenth century-so obstinate and ever-recurrent is the character of border warfare.

The following "types of womanhood," then, are embodied successively in these variegated pages. The canonised Saint, that most extraordinary product, as Mr. Trollope regards the matter, of the "ages of faith," highly interesting as a social, and perhaps more so still as a psychological phenomenon represented by the Sienese dyer's daughter, miracle-working Saint Catherine. Another Catherine follows, who, as "the feudal Châtelaine," one of the most remarkable results of the feudal system, is offered as a suggestive study of woman in man's place: this is Caterina Sforza, who suddenly passed (p. 263) from a life teeming with movement, activity, danger, pains, pleasures, and vicissitudes, to the dead. tranquillity of a secure cloister cell. Then comes Vittoria Colonna, described by Mr. Trollope as "the high-born and highly-educated Princess of a somewhat less rude day, whose inmost spiritual nature was so profoundly and injuriously modified by her social position." These three have a volume to themselves.

A second volume includes the seven Representative Women that remain. First, my lord cardinal's daughter, Tullia d'Aragona, "the brilliant literary denizen of 'La Bohème.'" Then, Olympia Morata, here called the equally brilliant but large-hearted and high-minded

daughter of the people, whose literary intimacies were made compatible with the strictest feminine propriety, and whom no princely connexions, lay and ecclesiastical, prevented from daring to think and to speak her thought, and to meet with brave heart the consequences of so doing. Next, Isabella Andreini, the popular actress, born a year or two before Shakspeare," again a daughter of the people, and again in that, as is said, perilous walk in life, a model of correct conduct in the midst of loose-lived princesses." Bianca Cappello is presented as the nobly-born adventuress," every step in whose extraordinary excelsior progress was an advance in degradation and infamy,"-that is to say, that the higher she rose the lower she sunk,—an unpleasing perversion of Excelsior, and abused Art of Bathos-" and whose history, in showing us court life behind the scenes, brings us among the worst company of any that the reader's varied journey will call upon him to fall in with." To her succeeds that "Pope Joan rediva," Olympia Pamfili, "the equally noblyborn, and almost equally worthless woman, who shows us that wonderful and instructive phenomenon, the Queen of a papal court." The penultimate decimal, so to speak, of the fair fractions who compose this Decade, is Elisabetta Sirani, the short-lived (1638-65) and humbly-born artist, "admirable for her successful combination in perfect compatibility of all the duties of the home and studio." And last of all appears La Corilla, as Maria Maddalena Morelli came to be called, who is here put forth as the "poor representative of the effeteness of that social system which had produced the foregoing types, the net result, as may be said, of the national passage through the various phases illustrated by them.' Forgotten as "the divine Corilla" of the eighteenth century is, and, by her biographer's admission, in no wise worthy of being remembered on any other ground, she was "the quintessential product and expression of the literary life of her time [1740-1800] and country." She was actually crowned at the Capitol in Rome in the year 1776-three predecessors only having been honoured with this coronation ceremony; Petrarch, to wit, Tasso, and a certain Perfetti, who, poor man (for once he was one), seems to be even more dead-and-gone, were the comparison no solecism, than the improvisatrice and pet pastorella of Rome's Mild Arcadians, not ever blooming, Corilla Olympica.

Such are the elect Ten. And they are all presented by our author as curiously distinct manifestations of womanhood,his prefatory pages on them closing with the remark, that if any measure of success has been attained in the endeavour to represent them duly surrounded by the social environment which produced them, while they helped to fashion it, some contribution will have been made to a right understanding of woman's nature, and of the true road towards her more completely satisfactory social development. Without at present offering an opinion as to "the true road," whither it wends, or who they be that travel by it, we may be allowed to congratulate Mr. Trollope on his success in depicting the "social environment' " which encompassed his several heroines, his minutely picturesque descriptions of which constitute, in fact, the most attractive and valuable feature of the work. The volumes are almost unique in this respect, such is their fulness of detail, their large employment of accessories, and effective introduction of background and side-scenes.