The exclusiveness of the Court of Vienna has become a byword; so strictly is the right of entry criticised that few indeed of those who pass through the country ever gain a glimpse of the highest circles of all. The nobles of Austria-Hungary rigidly keep within their class limits; they do not meet and mingle with the upper middle class as is the custom in so many countries; there is no overlapping, no exchange of social courtesies; marriages are confined to their own class, and a girl who marries outside it is considered an outcast. The aristocracy suffer therefore from a lack of fresh blood in their veins; they are not constantly recruited either by marriages or by the ennobling of commoners as in England, where--though it may be a source of merriment to see the tide of peerages setting in this or that way according to the political party in power--at all events there is always a constant stream of new life flowing toward the upper classes. And the aristocrats do not suffer. There is a marvellously refining influence in place and state and dignity, and the third generation of the soap-earl or the brewer-baron takes his place as naturally and easily in gentle society as the son of a hundred earls. The Austrian nobles, however, would never receive recently ennobled peers. The sixteen quarterings are to them a necessary passport to friendliness. It is said that on one occasion when an Austrian noble had been setting forth the impossibility of associating with those he did not consider his equals, the Emperor rebuked him by saying, “If I, like you, wished to confine myself to the society of my equals, I should have to go down into the Capuchin vault [where the Hapsburgs are buried] to find them.” Not only by the want of new blood do the nobles of the Dual Monarchy suffer, but also from an exclusiveness in regard to the occupations that they consider it dignified for their sons to follow. In England not so very long ago there were only three openings for the sons of gentlemen--Law, the Church, or the Services--and the Austrian nobleman has not arrived even so far as that. To him politics and the army are the only openings, and by this narrowing and stultification of interests originality and initiative are deadened. All the healthy energetic life that might be his is monopolised by the upper middle classes, who prosper accordingly, and have an upper class or aristocracy of their own. Though the government of the country is in reality an oligarchy, very different from the autocracy of its great neighbour Germany, yet at the same time it is the class below that of the nobility which gets the most fun out of life and is most in evidence.