MAX FRANZ, THE NEW ELECTOR Max Franz was in his twenty-eighth year when he came to Bonn. He was of middle stature, strongly built and already inclining to that corpulence which in his last years made him a prodigy of obesity. If all the absurdities of his eulogists be taken for truth, the last Elector of Cologne was endowed with every grace of mind and character that ever adorned human nature. In fact, however, he was a good-looking, kindly, indolent, somewhat choleric man; fond of a joke; affable; a hater of stiff ceremony; easy of access; an honest, amiable, conscientious ruler, who had the wisdom and will to supply his own deficiencies with enlightened and skilful ministers, and the good sense to rule, through their political foresight and sagacity, with an eye as much to the interests of his subjects as his own. In his boyhood he was rather stupid. Swinburne dismisses him in two lines: “Maximilian is a good-natured, neither here-nor-there kind of youth.” The brilliant, witty, shrewdly observant Mozart wrote to his father (Nov. 17, 1781): “To whom God gives an office he also gives an understanding. This is really the case with the Archduke. Before he became a priest he was much wittier and more intellectual and talked less, but more sensibly. You ought to see him now! Stupidity looks out of his eyes; he talks eternally, always in falsetto; he has a swollen neck--in a word, the man is completely transformed.” His mother had supplied him with the best instructors that Vienna afforded, and had sent him travelling pretty extensively for an archduke in those days. One of his journeys was to visit his sister Marie Antoinette in Paris, where his awkwardness and breaches of etiquette caused as much amusement to the anti-Austrian party as they did annoyance to the Queen, and afterwards to his brother Joseph, when they came to his ears. In 1778 he was with Joseph in the campaign in Bavaria. An injury to his knee, caused by a fall of his horse, is the reason alleged for his abandonment of a military career; upon which he was prevailed upon, so the “Historisches Taschenbuch” (II, Vienna, 1806) expresses it, to become a candidate for the Coadjutorship of Cologne. If he had to be “prevailed upon” to enter the church, the more to his credit was the course he pursued when once his calling and election were sure.