stored away forty
huge casks of his own vintage, worth six hundred ducats a cask, for the
use of monarchs and great nobles alone. From thence he proceeded to
Frankfort, a beautiful but to him a horrible town, I suppose, because it
was partially free; and while there he took occasion to visit five
universities, at all of which he was received as a sort of deity,--the
students following his carriage with uncovered heads, and with cheers
and shouts, curious to see what sort of a man it was who had so easily
suppressed revolution in Italy, and who ruled Germany with such an
iron hand.

And yet while Metternich so completely extinguished the fires of
liberty in the countries which he governed, he was doomed to see how
hopeless it was to do the same in other lands by mere diplomatic
intrigues. In 1822 the Spanish revolution broke out; and a year after
came the Greek revolution, with all its complications, ending in a war
between Russia and Turkey. From this he stood aloof, since if he helped
the Turks to put down insurrection he would offend the Emperor
Alexander, thus far his best ally, and commit Austria to a war from
which he shrank. It was his policy to preserve his country from
entangling wars. It was as much as he could do to preserve order and law
in the various States of Germany, at the cost of all intellectual
progress. But he watched the developments of liberty in other parts of
Europe with the keenest interest, and his correspondence with the
different potentates--whether monarchs or their ministers--is very
voluminous, and was directed to the support of absolutism, in which
alone he saw hope for Europe. The liberal views of the English Canning
gave Metternich both solicitude and disgust; and he did all he could to
undermine the influence of Capo D'Istrias, the Greek diplomatist, with
his imperial master the Czar. He hated any man who was politically
enlightened, and destroyed him if he could. The event in his long reign
which most perplexed him and gave him the greatest solicitude was the
revolution in France in 1830, which unseated the Bourbons, and
established the constitutional government of Louis Philippe; and this
was followed by the insurrection of the Netherlands, revolts in the
German States, and the Polish revolution. With the year 1830 began a new
era in European politics,--a period of reform, not always successful,
but enough to show that the spirit of innovation could no longer be
suppressed; that th