Under the pressure of this soulless despotism the mind of man seemed to lose all its finer powers. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which no decade passed in England and France without the production of some literary masterpiece, some scientific discovery, or some advance in political reasoning, are marked by no single illustrious Austrian name, except that of Haydn the musician. When, after three generations of torpor succeeding the Thirty Years' War, the mind of North Germany awoke again in Winckelmann and Lessing, and a widely-diffused education gave to the middle class some compensation for the absence of all political freedom, no trace of this revival appeared in Austria. The noble hunted and slept; the serf toiled heavily on; where a school existed, the Jesuit taught his schoolboys ecclesiastical Latin, and sent them away unable to read their mother-tongue. To this dull and impenetrable society the beginnings of improvement could only be brought by military disaster. The loss of Silesia in the first years of Maria Theresa disturbed the slumbers of the Government, and reform began. Although the old provincial Assemblies, except in Hungary and the Netherlands, had long lost all real power, the Crown had never attempted to create a uniform system of administration: the collection of taxes, the enlistment of recruits, was still the business of the feudal landowners of each district. How such an antiquated order was likely to fare in the presence of an energetic enemy was clearly enough shown in the first attack made upon Austria by Frederick the Great. As the basis of a better military organisation, and in the hope of arousing a stronger national interest among her subjects, Theresa introduced some of the offices of a centralised monarchy, at the same time that she improved the condition of the serf, and substituted a German education and German schoolmasters for those of the Jesuits. The peasant, hitherto in many parts of the monarchy attached to the soil, was now made free to quit his lord's land, and was secured from ejectment so long as he fulfilled his duty of labouring for the lord on a fixed number of days in the year. Beyond this Theresa's reform did not extend. She had no desire to abolish the feudal character of country life; she neither wished to temper the sway of Catholicism, nor to extinguish those provincial forms which gave to the nobles within their own districts a shadow of political independence. Herself conservative in feeling, attached to aristocracy, and personally devout, Theresa consented only to such change as was recommended by her trusted counsellors, and asked no more than she was able to obtain by the charm of her own queenly character. [Joseph II., 1780-1790.]