der and alone valid one, according to which, it is not you, it is
I that am the real and sole Heir of Austria.'

"This he says, and has steadily said or meant: 'It is I that am to be
King of Bohemia; I that shall and will inherit all your Austrias, Upper,
Under, your Swabian Brisgau or Hither Austria, and what of the Tyrol
remained wanting to me. Your Archduchess will have Hungary, the
Styrian-Carinthian Territories; Florence, I suppose, and the Italian
ones. What is hers by right I will be one of those that defend for her;
what is not hers, but mine, I will defend against her, to the best of
my ability!' This was privately, what it is now publicly, his argument;
from which he never would depart; refusing always to accept Kaiser
Karl's new Pragmatic Sanction; getting Saxony (who likewise had a
Ferdinand great-grandmother) to refuse,--till Polish Election compelled
poor Saxony, for a time. Karl Albert had likewise secretly, in past
years, got his abstruse old Cousin of the Pfalz (who mended the
Heidelberg Tun) to back him in a Treaty; nay, still better, still more
secretly, had got France itself to promise eventual hacking:--and, on
the whole, lived generally on rather bad terms with the late Kaiser
Karl, his Wife's Uncle; any reconciliation they had proving always
of temporary nature. In the Rhenish War (1734), Karl Albert, far from
assisting the Kaiser, raised large forces of his own; kept drilling
them, in four or three camps, in an alarming manner; and would not even
send his Reich's Contingent (small body of 3,000 he is by law bound
to send), till he perceived the War was just expiring. He was in angry
controversy with the Kaiser, claiming debts,--debts contracted in the
last generation, and debts going back to the Thirty-Years War, amounting
to hundreds of millions,--when the poor Kaiser died; refusing payment to
the last, nay claiming lands left HIM, he says, by Margaret Mouthpoke:
[Michaelis, ii. 260; Buchholz, ii. 9; Hormayr, _Anemonen,_ ii. 182;
&c.] 'Cannot pay your Serene Highness (having no money); and would not,
if I could!' Leaving Karl Albert to protest to the uttermost;"--which,
as we ourselves saw in Vienna, he at once honorably did.

Karl Albert's subsequent history is known to readers; except the
following small circumstance, which occurred in his late transit,
flight, or whatever we may call it, to Mannheim, and is pleasantly made
notable to us by Wilhelmina. "His Highness on the way from Munchen,"