Indeed, we have already seen him doing so. In his married life we have seen him as the average man puzzled by the exceptional woman—puzzled but pursuing to the last. In his political life we have seen him flexible rather than strong, wise in his selection of counsellors, but sometimes knowing better than they did, and always, in later years at least, cutting the right figure in the eyes of the world: an Emperor, indeed—“something like an Emperor,” as people say—magnificent, authoritative, genial, and affable, though of an affability on which none must venture to presume. It may be, of course, that there is more here of appearance, carefully kept up, than of the reality which compels appearance to conform to it; but one’s impression, in any case, is of an Emperor whom the discipline of a strict education and early responsibilities has, as it were, standardised. But, if the Emperor has been standardised, the Archdukes have not. They have gone as they have pleased, differing from other people as Habsburgs must, but not differing from them in the pursuit of any uniform ideal—often, indeed, striking extraordinary attitudes in their strenuous endeavours to get back to the manners and methods of ordinary mankind. Already we have met a few of them: the Crown Prince Rudolph, a man of letters, a rake, and perhaps a potential rebel; “John Orth,” a musician, a pamphleteer, and a hot-tempered visionary pelting the Emperor with the insignia of the Golden Fleece. It remains, leaving those stories behind us, to complete our picture of the Habsburg Court with a review of the proceedings of some of the others. We may even go back a little way for the purpose; for, though the memory of the more distant events has been effaced by recent excitements, Francis Joseph has had trouble with his brothers as well as his son, his grandchildren, his nephews and nieces, and his cousins. Maximilian, as we have seen, wounded his feelings by more than one offensively pointed bid for popularity at his expense. Charles Louis is described by Countess Marie Larisch as “a fat old man with brutish instincts,” and accused by her of ill-treating his wife, who, on her part, was understood to be in love with her Chamberlain. The proceedings of the third brother, Louis Victor, are still wrapped in a shroud of mystery which it might be indiscreet to try to tear; but his career as a butterfly of fashion was cut suddenly short by Francis Joseph’s peremptory command to him to leave Vienna for Salzburg and stay there. That is the end of the list of brothers, but only the beginning of the list of eccentric or otherwise unsatisfactory Archdukes. Whether any general impression of an abstract Archduke will result from an enumeration of the performances of several concrete Archdukes is dubious; but it will nevertheless be worth while to make out a list in the hope that the figures will somehow group themselves into a subject picture.