-Blackwood's Magazine.

THE Vienna of a dozen years ago was a pleasant capital enough for the few who had the entrée of the most exclusive coterie in Europe; but it was the very last city where one would have dreamed of hold ing an International Exhibition. It was aristocratic far more than industrial or commercial. The fathers of the city assembled for council in a homely building in the narrow Wipplinger Strasse, a building whose unassuming appearance was quite in keeping with the unpretending habits of the men who used it. The citizens looked as if they were well to do; there were few beggars to be seen, except those who hung on to the skirts of the Church; but except for occasional outbursts of feudal pomp and magnificence, there were not many signs of great for tunes, and none of colossal wealth. The Bourse, a modern institution, was more humble than the old town-hall. The brokers burrowed away in lanes and sidealleys. The old-fashioned banking business was conducted in respectable parlors, or in cages behind gratings on dingy second floors. Branches of the greatest moneyed houses in Europe managed their affairs quietly in suites of apartments in their private mansions. The shops, like the cafes, were dark and unattractive; the shopkeepers sat dozing behind their counters at noon, and for a couple of hours afterwards buying and selling seemed at a standstill. Except for a big brewery or two, there were few signs of manufactures, and scarcely a solitary factory-chimney rose among the spires of the churches to pollute the clear atmosphere with its smoke. The city itself was perhaps less taking in its exterior than any capital of similar pretensions, and strangers were so little in the way of coming to it, that it made but indifferent preparations to receive them.

The best hotels were singularly cheerless, and offered you few inducements to prolong your stay. Each of them had its provincial clientèle, which it chiefly relied upon: one was a Hungarian house; another was affected by the Bohemian or Moravian nobility; while a third had its old-established connection among merchants from Trieste and the shores of the Adriatic. Each seemed to consult the tastes of its country customers by making the contrast between city and country as violent as might be. Those like the Archduke Charles and the Münsch were excellent in their own way, with a capital cuisine and great civility. But the brightest of their bedrooms were so many nurseries for the blue-devils. You seldom saw a sunbeam in the summer-time, although the thermometer might be marking 90° in the dark courtyard; and you were stifled, with your party of ladies, in the salons of the low-browed restaurauts, among the Austrian gentlemen who were smoking with closed windows. English visitors flocking to an Exhibition would have found themselves strangely dépaysé, had they taken up their quarters in one of the numerous second-class inns that laid themselves out for the citizens from provincial towns, and the agriculturist who had come on pleasure-trips to the capital. In the Stadt Gratz, Stadt Prag, Stadt Constantinopel, you found sanded floors and stale tobacco scents, short beds and small basins; although there were capital veal cutlets, to do them justice, and excellent Vöslauer and Adelsberger. Had you looked out for lodgings, and found them, you would have learned to appreciate the comforts of the inns, although, according to the custom of the city, you lived independent of domestic cookery, and went abroad for all your meals. The palaces of the

nobility were gaunt and forbidding, although, in these at least, there was space enough and to spare; as for the bourgeoisie, they huddled themselves together, floor above floor, in their many-storied houses, in confined accommodation that was gradually growing more costly. They eked out rents that were relatively exorbitant, by offering a closet or a double bedded "cabinet" on unreasonable terms. Notwithstanding that Vienna has long been a city of upholsterers, and although one of its suburbs is almost peopled by the guild, it appeared that the furniture, sculptured in walnut-wood and padded with velvet, was made for export rather than for home consumption. Why, indeed, should a frugal house-holder replace his venerable heir-looms? In their picturesque tatters and their neutral tones, they harmonised so admirably with the gloom and the dinginess that kept the secrets of their dilapidation and decay.

If strangers were apt to find their quarters dull, the aspect of things out of doors was by no means particularly lively to them. The best of the cafés and restaurants were low and dark, close and crowded to overflowing. The most handsome of the streets were tall and narrow, and few of the thoroughfares could boast of pavements. Of a wet day it was as much as your clothes were worth, to say nothing of your life, to run the gauntlet of the equipages in the Kärnthner Strasse. The reckless coachmen, swaying from side to side with loosened reins and slouching seats, rattled through the seas of mud that flew in showers over the pedestrians and the shop-windows. The drip from the housetops ruined your hat, and in the mob that jostled you, it was idle to dream of holding up an umbrella. It is true the richly-wooded environs of the city were delightful; but it was a long drive to reach the nearest of them through the mean and straggling suburbs. It is true there was a variety of entertainment advertised for the evening, from the Court opera to Sperl's "free-and-easy" in the Leopoldstadt. It is true that there were bands playing nightly in sequestered beer-gardens, weather permitting; and that in the Volks Garten in particular, the blaze of the lamps, the gaily-dressed society, the foaming of the beer, and the soul-stirring strains of Strauss's capelle, transported you into fairy-land, or at least to a German Valhalla. But, un

like the Viennese, strangers cannot live by Dreher's beer or Strauss's music alone; and had they come in crowds to some spécial attraction, they would have found that their room would have been more welcome than their company in the hotels and the restaurant, the beer-gardens and the dancing-saloons.

For generations the easy-going Viennese had gone on enjoying their life in their own easily jovial way, and enjoying it thoroughly. They had changed little in their city or their habits since the days when their hereditary enemies of Constantinople had been in the way of coming periodically to beleaguer them. They were profoundly satisfied with all about them, partly because they had had few opportunities of contrasting their belongings with those of their neighbors; partly because they were blessed with admirable digestions and an inexhaustible fund of good temper, and are more easily entertained than any people in the world. They combined Southern sensibility and sprightliness with a good deal of German impassibility and phlegm; and antipathetical as these ingredients may seem to be, they blended most happily in the Austrian nature.

In short, they lived on the best of terms with themselves, charmed with their rather monotonous existence, and wonderfully proud of their city and its time-honored institutions. Had each private dwelling been as stately as the Imperial Residence, where the Kaiser resided in stately gloom, amid ponderous decorations, superb shields of quarterings, and the colossal equestrian bronzes of his ancestors; had every one of their public buildings been as solemnly magnificent as their cathedral, with its glorious glass casting a sombre light on its time-blackened colums,--they could not have chanted their famous refrain about "the only Kaiserstadt" with more enthusiasm of joyous conviction. Thorough conservatives, as they were excellent Catholics, no man thought of rebuilding his house, or cared to improve on his manner of living. The heads of the great historical families spent as much of their princely incomes as they drew from their embarrassed estates, like good old Austrian noblemen all of the olden time, and kept open house in magnificent patriarchal fashion. There were magnates-like old Prince Esterhazy in his spacious mansion on the Freying

Seldom, perhaps, has one seen a change so sudden as that which turned the Vienna of the Congress into the bustling Vienna of the International Exhibition. We suspect it must have been flattery that told Augustus he had found Rome of brick to leave it of marble; and, had the compliment been true, he could boast of having done but little towards demoralising by luxury the worthy citizens of the Empire. M. Haussmann and his master found the materials of their grand French transformation-scene ready to their hands; and although they lavished more upon gorgeous properties than any of their predecessors of the monarchies or republics, yet every one had known that Paris was rich, and by no means reluctant to ruin itself in display. The Parisians of the Second Empire were not very different from their fathers; only when the fashion of extravagance was set them they spent more lightly the money they had made more easily. But the Viennese seemed to have changed their natures as entirely as they were to revolutionise the exterior of their city. And as for their city, the comprehensiveness of their building schemes left those of the Ædile of the French Empire altogether in the background. A community of timorous and parsimonious burghers seemed turned of a sudden into so many speculators and spendthrifts; and, what was almost as strange, they appeared to have come at once into an almost unlimited command of capital. It is easy to suggest some of the causes of the change, although its suddenness is a phenomenon it is difficult to account for. Austria could not always lag behind when all the Western world was in movement; and when once she fell into the fashions of the day, the sense of her backwardness was sure to accelerate her progress. She had constructed railwaysit is true they were but single lines-and people had begun to travel by them. She had exhibited at other exhibitions, and had come creditably enough out of the competition so far back as twenty years before. Her manufacturers were adopting foreign improvements, and entering the field against foreign rivals. She had been gradually creating a wealthier moneyed class who were accumulating money they were learning to risk, and were beginning to look for new fields of investment. Her Government had been learning in the school of adversity, and had at length ac

who spread their family tables at mid-day for any of their kinsmen and connections who chose to accept their hospitality. It was a convenient arrangement for the cadets of cadets, who had no career open to them except the honorable but ill-paid profession of arms. These magnates turned out in semi-barbaric state in the Prater of a spring evening with their clusters of well-known liveries and their magnificently plumed chasseurs. There was as great a gulf between patricians and plebeians as ever there was in the Rome of the Republic. That was possibly the reason why the latter were content to go on so unassumingly. They knew that no display could carry them across the chasm that separated them inexorably from the aristocracy of birth. Building a showy mansion and moving into it would have brought nothing to recompense them for a deal of unpleasantness. They would have had to sacrifice their comfortably unceremonious way of life at the cost of provoking constant humiliation. Their equals would have sneered at them; their superiors would have snubbed them. Nor was there much object in making haste to be rich, when a moderate income gave most people all they wanted. The nobles lived on the rents of their lands as their fathers had done, and were much more in the practice of negotiating loans than of looking out for eligible investments. The tradesmen did a quiet old-fashioned business, and regarded absolute security in the disposition of their savings rather than rapid accumulation. Manufacturers were yet in their infancy: out of Brunn, and one or two other rising industrial centres, the manufacturers were like tradesmen in a larger way of business, running somewhat greater risks and exposed to heavier calls. Austria is essentially an agricultural nation: it has but a single seaport of consequence, and its communications with foreign markets were slow and precarious. Agriculturists are a proverbially quiet-going people, who live a good deal on home-grown produce, and content themselves with modest gains and an unpretentious expenditure. Vienna was the genuine capital of the country; and, until a dozen or fifteen years ago, never was there a community that seemed more fondly wedded to the habits of the past, or more resolutely averse to anything that smacked of innovation.

knowledged the existence of the people. For the first time for long there was a fair assurance of peace and growing prosperity; for the Empire had gained strength and friends by its humiliating defeats and territorial lossess, while its reconstruction upon a constitutional basis reassured its subjects with an unfamiliar sense of stability.

But the immediate authors of this strange municipal revolution were undoubtedly a knot of internationalist adventurers-not the internationalists who take for the watchword of their propoganda, "la proprieté, c'est le vol," although there might have been excellent reasons why they should have done so-but internationals who laid themselves out for cosmopolitan speculations; who promoted venturesome schemes all the world over; who bid and bribed in all countries for concessions they were pretty certain to profit by, whether the undertakings they floated should sink or swim; who dabbled freely in time bargains in "Spanish," "Italians," and "Turks;" who placed loans where security was shaky on handsome commissions; who had established financial "connections" with the leading bourses in Europe; and who were always on the look out for openings for virgin adventure. Already the introduction of successful banks and credit companies had been tempting out the savings of the Austrians and paving the way for bolder operations. Second-rate houses of Greeks and Hebrews -men whose means fell far short of their ambitions-saw their way to borrowing cheaply and investing profitably, could they once give building an impulse in Vienna. Of course they could have done little or nothing had they not found a public to exploiter. But already there were Viennese who began to feel ashamed of the primitive condition of their boasted Kaiserstadt. There were moneyed citizens whose acquisitiveness had been excited by hearings of the great fortunes that were being made so rapidly abroad. There were well-to-do people who were ready to move into more commodious houses, if any one took the trouble to provide these, and if their neighbors could be persuaded to keep them countenance in the change. When the first new houses were built sites were comparatively cheap, and the workmen's wages for from high. The new blocks of building filled up fast, and paid their pro

jectors handsomely. The example set of housing one's self luxuriously, there were many who felt that noblesse or richesse obliged them to follow it. The promoters of credit companies saw their opportunity, and those first in the field were speedily followed by a host of struggling imitators. Nothing needs less capital than building, so long as you can find credit, for you can always borrow on your bit of land, and obtain fresh advances on your rising structure. Trifling capital yielded disproportionate returns. The companies that financed the building operations could dispense with calls, and their shares rose rapidly. All classes rushed in to buy-nobles, bankers, merchants, shopkeepers, petty rural pro- . prietors-all hurried on to a common ground to join in the general scramble. No one could take exception to the prospectuses of the new schemes, for no one could deny that the city was much underhoused; and if this building business turned so quickly to a dangerous mania, it was because in its beginnings it was thoroughly legitimate. It was the constitutional carefulness of the Viennese that made them cast their prudence to the winds. It is the man who looks the most closely to his money who is the most envious of the better fortune of his next-door neighbor. It seemed hard to go on pinching and saving through a year, to lay by less than your old crony of the café has turned in a week. It was so safe and easy to speculate on a certainty. So every one took to building individually or in society; every one who embarked in building grew rapidly rich, and felt impelled to change into better quarters with his better fortunes. His new apartments had to be newly furnished: with spacious rooms and handsome furniture, you were bound to launch out in your manner of living. A plutocracy was growing up by the side of the aristocracy, and new nouveaux riches might shine by display in a set of their own, though they could show no quarterings on their gaudy carriages. As for carriages, they came into common use with people who had never gone beyond the café at the corner, or the beer-cellar in the next street, except when they hired a fiacre for an outing in the suburbs, or drove to the Wurst Allee in the Prater of a Sunday afternoon. In course of a dozen of years, the dull old German city, whose most cheerful houses had been those grated convents with their

blank whitewashed walls that stared down from the bastions on the glacis, had been turned into a city of palaces. It might have puzzled even the builders to tell how many of these were founded on cash and how many were based on credit; but the new streets began to be filled with people, flaunting in the latest fashions from Paris, who flattered themselves they were at least abreast of the age, and had certainly got into the way of freely discounting the future.

Those who had known Vienna in former times might well rub their eyes when they came to visit the Exhibition. They had read of extensive building operations, of wholesale demolitions, of the levelling of the old fortifications that cramped the place; and of the Ringstrasse, or circular Boulevard, that had been run round the city. But, like the Queen of Sheba, on her visit to the King of Israel, they found that the half of the wonders had never been told them. Coming from the station in the suburbs, they crossed a river that had been newly reclaimed, embanked, and spanned by magnificent bridges. They passed by superb piles, set off by inscriptions in letters of gold that dedicated them to arts, arms, and industries. They saw barracks that might almost vie with the Caserne Napoleon, and hospitals that scarcely yielded in size to the Hôtel Dieu. But it was in the long new streets devoted to private dwellings that the Viennese might boast of eclipsing the Parisians. It was not only these magnificent boulevards, with their superb sweep, their imposing hôtels-we use the word in the French sense -and their seductive shops, with grand plate-glass windows, all absolutely novel creations in Vienna. But whole quarters had sprung up everywhere, equally stately, as it seemed, in their appearance. One thing struck you especially, when you drew the comparisons that are inevitable although odious: there was infinitely greater variety in the Viennese than in the Parisian architecture; and with all the variety, there was a general simplicity of harmony. The long lines of buildings were broken picturesquely into blocks; and although the whole of them preserved a family resemblance, these blocks had often a marked individuality of their own. Here and there, with more or less excuse, there was more or less of the luxury of ostentation. Thus it was not unnatural

that the grand opera house, situated where the old high street of the city debouched on the most fashionable of the new boulevards, should be lavishly florid in the decorations of its magnificent stone-work. When an archduke and prince of the blood condescended to build his archducal palace in a row with the dwellings of humbler men, it was but right and meet that he should break out into sculptured friezes and carve caryatides over the portals where sentries were to keep watch and ward. Joint-stock companies (limited) sought to advertise their new hotels by similar display; and an enterprising firm ornamented its lofty façade with frescoes in gold and colors that reminded you of the pristine glories of the Pinacothec at Munich; and of course there were costly eccentricities of ecclesiastical architecture, as is always the case where "additional church accommodation" is .provided for rich and fashionable quarters. It was evident that no expense had been spared; on the whole, everything was in as good taste as it was handsome; and yet one's first impressions were less favorable than they should have been, even before one became conscious of the defects of the drainage; nor were they greatly modified on more intimate acquaintance.

It is possible that these impressions do the city some injustice. From first to last the Viennese have had ill luck with the Exhibition, with which they celebrated so naturally the grand reconstruction of their capital. But in nothing, perhaps, were they more unfortunate-although it is a strong thing to say as much-than in the weather with which they welcomed their visitors who turned up for the opening day. You came from the inclemency of our northern spring, with the fond idea of basking in sunshine; of enjoying the balmy fresh breezes that blow over the plain that lies under the lofty Wienerwald. You had improvidently left the warmer part of your winter wraps behind you, and you had travelled southward in the garments of spring with a thermometer sinking steadily towards zero. The pleasant orchards of Penzing and Schönbrunn were laden with snow-flakes instead of fruitblossoms as you passed them. The early arrival in the grey morning chill of a second winter was cheerless enough. The quarters that lie towards the Western railway stations were advancing but slowly in