I have said that the rule of exclusion as regards all that part of the Vienna world not nobly born was absolute. But if absoluteness can be conceived as ever becoming more absolute, the social law did so in the case of Jewish families. These were numerous, and many of them in respect of wealth, and more in respect of culture, were on a par with the best and highest portion of the Viennese society. I remember one Jewish family in particular, consisting of a widow and her daughter and her niece, with whom we became intimately acquainted, and in whom and whose surroundings we found a level of high culture (taking that word in its largest extension to all that goes to form the idiosyncrasy of a human being), far in advance of anything we met with among their social superiors. In fact the _grand monde_ of that far distant day in Vienna was frivolous, unintellectual, and, I am afraid I must say, uneducated to a remarkable degree. It had its own peculiar charm, which consisted in the most perfectly high-bred tone of manner combined with complete simplicity, the absolute absence of any sort of affectation whatever, and great good-nature. But in all my experience of them there was not to be found a salon among them of equal social attraction to that of my above-mentioned Jewish friends. But all this refers to the social conditions of a day, which, as my recent visits to Vienna have shown me, is one passed away and gone. It belongs to the days when “Vater Franz” was, or, to be accurate, had only two years previously ceased to be, the idol of Austrian, and especially Viennese loyalty and affection. The most striking instances of the devotion of all classes of the population to their emperor were constantly narrated to me. I specially remember the tale of one occasion, when the emperor had remained shut up in the palace for three or four days--or perhaps the period was somewhat longer--because he had caught a cold. A cloud seemed to have passed over the blue Vienna sky. The occasion of his first drive through the streets of the city after his little indisposition was an ovation! The people filled the streets, and hung about his carriage. Market women poked their faces in at the window to assure themselves that “Vater Franz” was restored to them none the worse for his confinement. It was, to the best of my remembrance, on every Thursday, at that time, that it had been the emperor’s practice to devote a certain number of hours in the day to receiving _any_ one of his subjects who had notified in the proper quarter a desire to speak with him. But might not some socialist or nihilist, or other description of radical, have easily shot him at one of those entirely unguarded interviews? Aye! but I am writing of half a century ago, before such things and persons had appeared upon the scene. And assuredly the possibility of such a catastrophe had never entered into the brain of any man, woman, or child in the Kaiserstadt.