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 Europe-their 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 aggrandizement-the fierce strife with the Turks, as wave after wave of Moslem invasion rolled up the Danube-the long conflicts and bloody persecutions of the Reformation-the thirty years' religious war-the meteoric career of Gustavus Adolphus and Charles XII. shooting athwart the lurid storms of battle-the intrigues of Popes the enormous pride, power and encroachments of Louis XIV. -the warfare of the Spanish succession and the Polish dismemberment—all these events combine in a sublime tragedy which fiction may in vain attempt to parallel.