MARIA THERESA (1717-1780), archduchess of Austria, queen of Hungary and Bohemia, and wife of the Holy Roman emperor Francis I., was born at Vienna on the 13th of May 1717. She was the eldest daughter of the Emperor Charles VI. (q.v.) and his wife Elizabeth of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. On the 12th of February 1736 she was married to her cousin Francis of Lorraine (q.v.), then grand duke of Tuscany, and afterwards emperor. Five sons and eleven daughters were born of this marriage. From the date of her father's death on the 20th of October 1740, till her own death in 1780, Maria Theresa was one of the central figures in the wars and politics of Europe. But unlike some sovereigns, whose reigns have been agitated, but whose personal character has left little trace, Maria Theresa had a strong and in the main a noble individuality. Her great qualities were relieved by human traits which make her more sympathetic. It must be allowed that she was fairly open to the criticism implied in a husbandly jest attributed to Francis I. While they were returning from the opera house at Vienna she said to him that the singer they had just heard was the greatest actress who had ever lived, and he answered "Next to you, Madam." Maria Theresa had undoubtedly an instinctive histrionic sense of the perspective of the theatre, and could adopt the appropriate attitude and gesture, passionate, dignified or pathetic, required to impress those she wished to influence. But there was no affectation in her assumption of a becoming bearing or in her picturesque words. The common story, that she appeared before the Hungarian magnates in the diet at Pressburg in 1741 with her infant son, afterwards Joseph II., in her arms, and so worked on their feelings that they shouted _Moriamur pro rege nostro Maria Theresia_, is only mythically true. But during the delicate negotiations which were required to secure the support of the Hungarian nobles she undoubtedly did appeal to them with passionate eloquence, and, we may believe, with a very pardonable sense of the advantage she obtained from her youth, her beauty and her sex. Her beauty, inherited from her mother, was of an open and noble German type. The official portrait by Muytens, engraved by Petit, gives a less convincing impression that an excellent chalk drawing of the head by Gabriel Mattei. In the conflict between her sense of what was morally just and her sense of duty to the state she laid herself open to the scoffing taunt of Frederick of Prussia, who said that in the first partition of Poland _elle pleurait et prenait toujours_. But the king of Prussia's taunt is deprived of its sting by the almost incredible candour of her own words to Kaunitz, that if she was to lose her reputation before God and man for respecting the rights of others it must not be for a small advantage--if, in fact, Austria was to share in the plunder of Poland, she was to be consoled for the distress caused to