burne had asked from Lord Townshend for Macleane the Kerry Livings, which were worth £1000 a-year; and that this was a fact in which Mr. Parish was more interested than any one else. We may also reasonably assume, that in mentioning Macleane as Junius, he may have taken the idea either from the general impression at the time, or what is more probable, from Lord Townshend himself, who must have felt a very great interest in the question, Who was Junius? Sir Woodbine Parish, grandson of the Rev. Henry Parish, who held the Kerry Livings, succeeded in obtaining a copy of the Tripartite Print, referred to in the preceding letter, and has kindly communicated it to us. It represents Burke and Lord Sackville, with Junius in a clergyman's dress, seated between them;* and we cannot doubt that, in the opinion of Lord Townshend, as well as of Mr. Parish, the clerical figure represented Macleane. It is probable that these Livings may have been asked for Macleane's father, who, as a Non-juring clergyman, had been driven out of Scotland,† and as there was not then a single Protestant in these livings, so as to require residence, it is just possible that Lachlan Macleane may have thought of qualifying himself to hold them, which was then a very easy matter. But in whatever way we may surmount these difficulties, the direct association of the name of Macleane with Junius, in the household of Lord Townshend, is a fact of considerable interest and importance. The left hand figure is represented leaning upon a volume marked Sublime and Beautiful, and is in the act of addressing the figure in the middle dressed in a gown and bands, who is listening to him with a pen in his right hand, and a sheet of paper in his left, at the head of which is written To the King. The right hand figure is pointing to a letter lying on the table, addressed to Ld. G. S-k-lle. The general title of the picture is JUNIUS, placed immediately below the middle figure, but embracing by a long bracket the other two figures.-The engraver's name is T. Bonnor. + See this Journal, vol. x. p. 131, 132. Germany in its Relation to France and Russia. 519 ART. VIII.-1. Das Leben des Minister Freiherrn von Stein. Berlin, 1851. Von G. H. PERZ. 4 vols. 2. Passages from my Life, &c. By BARON MUFFLING. Translated from the German. London, 1853. 3. Panslavism and Germanism. By COUNT VALERIAN KRASINSKI. London, 1848. 4. The Frontier Lands of the Christian and the Turk; Comprising Travels in the region of the Lower Danube, in 1850 and 1851. By a BRITISH RESIDENT of twenty years in the East. 2 vols. London, 1853. THE events of the last five years of European history form an episode almost unparalleled in modern times. The world has been astonished by the extreme rapidity with which the hopes of liberty have been raised and disappointed. The short reign of freedom has been replaced by a military despotism, united to a priestly reaction, the excesses of which have thrown into the shade those of which any defenders of liberty were guilty during that period of political saturnalia. Of all the countries which have been convulsed by these revolutions, none probably has raised fairer hopes, and produced bitterer disappointment in the minds of the true friends of liberty than Germany. It is melancholy to observe that a nation which in philosophy, literature, and art is second to none, has, notwithstanding its great theoretical knowledge of political science, shown itself in the hour of trial utterly incompetent to make a practical application of those principles which it often admirably discussed in academic chairs and literary productions. And it must be added, that no nation occupies a more important position than Germany in the political relations of Europe. In none should Great Britain especially be more deeply interested than in the central country of the Teutonic race-the continental power which may keep the balance between France and Russia. Our surprise, though not our regret, on account of the retrograde political history of Germany is, however, considerably diminished when we examine the circumstances under which that country has developed itself from the outbreak of the first French Revolution to our own time. Nothing better explains the political character of a nation than its history. This character, formed by the institutions under which a community has long remained, cannot be rapidly altered, and often continues to bear unmistakable traces of the circumstances by which it was formed for generations after these circumstances have ceased to exist. We mean in the course of this article to give our readers some account of the events which have effected the transition from the feudal constitution of Germany, as it was settled by the treaty of Westphalia, to its present political organization as established by the treaty of Vienna, and to conclude with a view of the present external and internal relations of the German Confederation. In our progress we shall take note of some of the principal characters who bore a prominent part in the various stages of this history. We have chosen as an appropriate peg on which to hang our historical picture, the recently published Life of BARON STEIN, that eminent statesman who belonged, by his birth and the early part of his public life, to the feudal period of Germany, and, by his efforts in the latter part of his career to renovate the political and social constitution of that country, to the present order of things, and who may thus be regarded as the connecting link between the earlier and the later stage of German development. At the period of the outbreak of the French Revolution of 1789, notwithstanding some changes which had been brought about chiefly by the usurpations of the more powerful of its members on the rights of their weaker colleagues, the German Empire continued in the same constitution and legal relations which it had received from the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. It possessed a complicated and ill-working state machinery; but it enjoyed a constitutional form of government, in which the rights of the smallest and weakest member of the Empire were defined and secured by law, as clearly and positively as those of the most powerful of the confederated princes. There was then (especially in the imperial cities) more legal and even practical liberty in Germany than under the governments which have since been established upon its ruins. The supreme authority of the Empire, in which all its members were represented, was vested in the Imperial Diet which met at Ratisbon. The differences between the members were decided by two imperial tribunals, viz., the Aulic Council of the Empire, which had always its seat at the residence of the Emperor, and the Cameral Tribunal (Reichs Kammer Gericht) which sat at Wetzlar. They were composed of members delegated by the different states, and presided over by an imperial deputy. The members were composed of temporal and spiritual princes, ecclesiastical dignitaries, and the immediate nobility of the Empire. It was to this last class of delegates that the family of Stein belonged, and a right noble and chivalrous race they were. Inheriting, since the year 1238, the castle and the lands of Nassau on the Lahn, they were distinguished by their valour, displayed both in the armies of the empire and in their private Germany before the French Revolution. 521 feuds. When peace was reigning at home they went abroad in quest of military adventure. They fought against France during the fourteenth century in the armies of Edward III. of England, and during the fifteenth in those of Charles the Bold of Burgundy. In the sixteenth century they embraced the doctrines of the Reformation, and this involved them in many troubles, particularly during the Thirty Years' War. The chivalrous dispositions of this ancient family not being tempered by the homely but more useful qualities of prudence and economy, their vast possessions became involved in difficulties; and it was in this condition that they descended to Philip von Stein, privy-councillor of the Elector of Mayence, and father of the statesman we now commemorate. In the paternal home young Stein received an excellent physical, intellectual, and moral education. Being destined by his parents to serve in the Imperial Chamber of Justice, he was sent, in 1773, in his fifteenth year, to study law in the University of Göttingen, which he left in 1777. Though he was the youngest son of his father, it was decided by a family compact, on account of the reckless prodigality of his elder brothers, that he should be the future head of his family, and consequently inherit the bulk of the family estates. This gave him the prospect of an independent position. But a life of ease and comparative idleness did not suit his active and energetic character, and he soon found a proper field for the exercise of his talents in the service of Frederick II. of Prussia, which he entered in 1780. The last years of the reign of Frederick were employed in jealously watching and counteracting the ambitious projects of the Emperor Joseph II. to extend the dominion of Austria at the expense of the minor States of Germany. It was in that cause that he had taken up arms in 1778, in the affair of the succession of Bavaria, which, however, terminated without bloodshed, in a few months, by the treaty of Teschen. But Joseph did not abandon his schemes of aggrandizement. He secured the non-interference of Russia by supporting the projects of the Empress Catherine against Turkey. The friendship of France was obtained by the influence of his sister, the Queen of Louis XVI. And England, especially interested as she was in maintaining the independence of the German empire, on account of Hanover, was then too much occupied with the American war to give any serious attention to the distant danger which threatened the independence of her monarch's German possessions. Frederick was therefore obliged to seek within the Empire itself for the means of correcting the ambitious schemes of its head. Notwithstanding his advanced age, he applied himself with great energy to the formation of a league of German princes for the preservation of their mutual VOL. XIX. NO. XXXVIII. 2 L rights, and concluded a treaty to that effect with Saxony and Hanover. It was of course important to gain over to the same alliance other German princes, secular as well as spiritual, and among the latter particularly the Elector of Mayence. As ArchChancellor of the empire he had great influence over the other princes. It was, however, not so easy to obtain the accession of the Elector to the treaty in question, as Austria had at his court a strong party, supported by the Russian and French ministers. It was on this occasion that, in 1785, Stein, who was then only twenty-seven years old, and had no experience in diplomacy, but many connexions at the court of Mayence, was sent there in order to assist the Prussian minister in obtaining the accession of the Elector. The difficulties of this mission were considerable. The little court of Mayence presented an entangled web of intrigues, in which diplomatists, jurists, priests, and women, actuated by public or private interest, took a more or less prominent part, affording a curious picture, which our limits do not permit us to introduce here, of the manners and prevalent opinions of that time. After several months of negotiation Stein and his colleague succeeded in their object, and the Elector signed the treaty of the confederated princes on the 10th October 1785. The accession of the principal ecclesiastical elector to a league devised by a Protestant prince proved to Joseph that he must expect a general opposition of the members of the empire to his projects against their independence. He was thus led, on due consideration, to desist from these schemes. Only a few years afterwards an external storm shook to its very foundations the whole fabric of that empire, which was thus saved by the diplomacy of Stein from an internal convulsion. We refer to the French Revolution, which broke out four years after the affair of Mayence, but of the imminence of which, as well as its momentous consequences for Germany, probably none of the politicians engaged in that affair had the remotest idea. The rivalry between the courts of Vienna and Berlin, though favourable to the preservation of the internal constitution of the empire, by no means contributed to its safety from external dangers. The monarchs and statesmen who then governed the principal German principalities were by no means equal to the political emergency occasioned by the revolution in France. Educated in the routine traditions which served as a rule of conduct to the cabinets of Europe, they could not measure the unexpected force of the revolutionary element. They were thus ill qualified to cope with dangers of an entirely novel kind, and compared to which those which a century before had threatened their country from the same quarter under Louis XIV. were insignificant. Frederick II. of Prussia died on the 16th August 1786, only |