1. Francis II., who became Emperor in 1792, and was on the throne when Napoleon broke up the Holy Roman Empire. 2. The Archduke John, whose romantic marriage with the daughter of a postmaster set a precedent for those morganatic unions which have recently become so frequent in the House of Habsburg. Leopold II. is described by the historians as a benevolent despot—a reformer according to his lights—who displayed great intolerance in religious matters, and died young through the unbridled indulgence of his amorous proclivities. Francis II. is an Emperor of whom it would be necessary to speak evil at length, if he, and not his grandson, were the subject of this narrative: a double-faced and incompetent ruler, who needed all the help he got from Metternich; a petty domestic tyrant, who behaved abominably towards his daughter Marie-Louise, his son-in-law Napoleon, and his grandson the Duc de Reichstadt. How he deliberately threw Neipperg at his daughter’s head for the express purpose of undermining the affection which her husband had, to his disgust, inspired in her, is a story which belongs to other pages than these. Here we will merely note that he married four wives, and by the second of them—Marie-Thérèse-Caroline-Josephine de Bourbon—had two sons, who now concern us:— 1. The Emperor Ferdinand, who succeeded to the throne in 1835, but bowed his head before the storm and abdicated in 1848, though he did not die until 1875. 2. The Archduke Francis Charles, who, as Ferdinand had no children, should have succeeded him, but whom his wife, the Archduchess Sophie, daughter of Maximilian I. of Bavaria, persuaded to resign his rights in favour of his eldest son, the present Emperor, Francis Joseph. That is all the genealogy which we need for the moment. It shows us the Habsburgs as a feeble folk—getting feebler as times got more tempestuous; and it also shows us Francis Joseph launched upon his stormy political career at the age of eighteen—launched upon it as the rising hope of a decadent family—a youth of energy and promise, with no sign of decadence about him, supple but strong, exempt, as far as could be judged, from the family taints of physique and character, and designed to restore the threatened dignity of the Austrian Empire, by confronting the new era in a new spirit. His accession will be our historical starting point; but, before we come to it, we must turn aside for a brief glance at some of those collateral ancestors whose traits, if there be anything in heredity, we may expect to see reappearing—not invariably, but here and there, and now and then—in their descendants, the Habsburgs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.