Austria Its Rise and Present Power

The studies of the author of this work for the last ten years in writing the History of Napoleon Bonaparte and The French Revolution of 1789 have necessarily made him quite familiar with the monarchies of Europe. He has met with so much that was strange and romantic in their career that he has been interested to undertake as it were a biography of the Monarchies of Continental Europetheir birth education exploits progress and present condition. He has commenced with Austria. There are abundant materials for this work. The Life of Austria embraces all that is wild and wonderful in history; her early struggles for aggrandizementthe fierce strife with the Turks as wave after wave of Moslem invasion rolled up the Danubethe long conflicts and bloody persecutions of the Reformationthe thirty years'' religious warthe meteoric career of Gustavus Adolphus and Charles XII. shooting athwart the lurid storms of battlethe intrigues of Popesthe enormous pride power and encroachments of Louis XIV.the warfare of the Spanish succession and the Polish dismembermentall these events combine in a sublime tragedy which fiction may in vain attempt to parallel.