On the whole it is--or rather I should say was--evident that one has travelled far eastward to reach Vienna, and the whole physiognomy of the place is modified by that fact. I am unwilling to close this chapter of my Vienna reminiscences without mentioning a lady, whose very exceptional histrionic talent had impressed me as vividly as it did my mother, who has given an honourable place in her volumes to Madame Rettich. I subsequently became intimate with her very charming daughter in Italy, and it is from her that I learned the fact that her mother had been the first actress to personate Goethe’s “Gretchen” on the stage. Considerable doubt had been felt as to the expediency of the attempt. But Madame Rettich made it--not for the first time at Vienna, but at some provincial theatre--with entire success. CHAPTER XVI. Of all my reminiscences of Vienna, and those I saw there, the most interesting are those connected with my introduction to Prince Metternich. The present generation is perhaps hardly aware--or not habitually so--of the largeness of the space Metternich occupied in the political world half a century ago. It is not too much to say that Europe in those days thought as much about Metternich as it does in these days about Bismarck. Of course the nature of the two men, as of the circumstances with which they were called on to deal, is far as the poles asunder. But on the European stage--not, of course, on the English--no actor of that day could compete with Prince Metternich in the importance of the position assigned to him by the world in general, as no actor of this day can with Prince Bismarck. It is hardly enough to say, as is said above, that the nature of the two men was as far as the poles asunder, it was singularly contrasted. To both of them the _salus patriæ_ has ever been the _suprema lex_; and both of them, with increasingly accepted wisdom; have sought that supreme end in the strengthening of the principle of authority. The history of human affairs has not yet sufficiently unfolded itself for it to be possible to say in this year of grace, 1887, whether they have done so with very different measures of success. But it is very curious to mark the similarity thus far existing between the two great ministers, chancellors, and statesmen, combined with such very marked (though perhaps in fact more or less superficial) differences between the two men. Prince Bismarck has not been thought, even by those who have most thoroughly admired and applauded his _fortiter in re_, to have very successfully combined with it the _suaviter in modo_. The habit of clothing the iron hand with a velvet glove has not been considered to be among his characteristics. And these qualities were very pre-eminently those of the other all-powerful minister.