THE PRINCE DE LIGNE.

"This chub-faced fop

Shines sleek with full cramm'd fat of happiness."

JOHN MARSTON: Antonio's Revenge.

THE Prince de Ligne has, at least, the merit of being not only a "beau," but a "brave." The two professions are seldom united, but they were certainly to be found in this gallant coxcomb.

The Prince, although ever faithful to the fortunes of the House of Hapsburg, was not himself of Austrian lineage. His patrimonial house, the Castle of Belveil, still stands in quaint supremacy over the modest village of Ligne, about six miles from Alt, in Belgium. It has endured seven centuries of change; and its gothic peculiarities, with its oldworld garden, and its ancient hornbeam hedges, yet answer to the prolix description thereof given in the Prince's published letters, as well as to the concise, if little majestic, line of Delille, who says of it in his 'Jardins,'

"Belveil, tout à la fois magnifique et champêtre."

Here, in 1734, the Prince first saw the light; and the soldiers of his father's regiment de Ligne,' loved to carry the infant son of their prince-colonel in their arms. The lengthened life of this once celebrated dandy, author, diplomatist, and soldier, made him the contemporary of men of many generations. The man who once fraternally embraced our own Wellington, Prince of Waterloo, had sat on the knee of the famous Prince Eugene, and had looked upon the ma

tured greatness of Marlborough. Thus he was contemporary with men who had been born under the son of James I., and with others now living under Queen Victoria, whom God preserve!

After, as a boy, carrying the colours of his father's regiment with honour, he entered the dragoons of Ligne, and won distinction at the point of his sword. He was practically a noble soldier, and he slaughtered as courteously as Bayard. His day was not the day of carpet-knights, for Europe was then given to settle all her quarrels in the field; and when cabinets cooled, warriors looked to their corslets. Theoretically, the Prince does not shine. Nobody reads his 'Commentaries on the Art of War;' and I have no doubt that the martial portion of his departed spirit is sorely vexed, at seeing his own highly-prized instructions for infantry manœuvres less cared for by posterity than the old Greek's dissertation upon the forming of the phalanx.

For more than half a century he lived in camps, and was daily familiar with every dread circumstance of war. He bore himself bravely at the bloody siege of fatal Ismael, and was among the most active at that taking of Belgrade, which Storace put so pleasantly to music for the delight of our fathers. In the fields of death, whereon, with varied fortune, the Great Frederick and the crafty Maria Theresa fought out their envenomed quarrels, there he was ever present, the finest, the foremost, and the fiercest in the fray. And most of all, on that famous day at Maxen, when the Austrian Daun caught Frederick's general, Finck, in the defiles, and took bloody advantage of the opportunity,on that day of untold horrors, courage and murder reigned supreme. Ere night came on, the Black Eagle of Brandenburg had yielded to his double-necked cousin from the Danube. Every Prussian who survived the fight, surrendered. The matériel for a hundred such fields passed into

the hands of the Austrians, and the museums of Vienna still hold the countless trophies of that day.

It was a day on which compensation was taken for the adverse fields of Stringau, Reichemberg, and Johr; for the defeats at Pirna, Rosbach, and Lissa. The women of Berlin were rendered widows and childless, while the flaunting dames of Vienna shouted "Hoch!" and declared that their victorious lovers at Maxen had surpassed all the glories connected with old triumphs at Kolin, Gabel, and Zittau; at Liegnitz, Schweidnitz, and Hochkirchen.

Maria Theresa dubbed the young Prince knight of that order of chivalry which bore her name,-an Order into which no aspirant could find admittance unless he had achieved some conquest which he had no positive order to undertake. She further honoured him by despatching him to France with the news of the great victory; and there he became the intimate friend of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the cavalier of the basely brilliant Du Barry, and the cynosure of all the hooped ladies and red-heeled gallants who killed Time on the verdant lawns of the Trianon or in the gilded saloons of Versailles. He became at once the King of Fashion, as he was the favourite of a dozen kings. Two Louises named him "friend;" and he sat, a gallant servitor, at the feet of Marie Antoinette. The great Frederick showed his affection for him by bestowing on him that very bad pen with which the King wrote very bad poetry, and the Prince still worse. The great Catherine he served in many acceptable offices. She loved the man and his humour. Once, when accompanying the imperial mother of All the Russias in a progress through her southern dominions, they skirted, in a yacht, the coast of Old Tauris. On passing the promontory of Iphigenia, the Empress made present of it to the Prince, who thereon, accoutred as he was, leaped overboard, and, with sword drawn, swam ashore, to take formal possession of the ter

ritorial gift. He was indeed a sort of cousin to the living heads of kingly houses; and, at one time, was looked upon as the probable occupant of the uneasy throne of Poland. Like many a kingly contemporary, he might for a long time have thanked Heaven that he was without a crown. But he was equal to the difficulties consequent upon a light purse. On one occasion he wished to proceed from Paris to Brussels; but, prince as he was, he lacked the means. Hearing that the Duke d'Aremberg was about to travel that way, he presented himself at the post-house as his courier, rode the journey through in that character, and so got to his destination-gratis.

Such, in his early days, was the gay gentleman who, at the last Congress of Vienna, bore still gaily the weight of eighty summers. His lean horses used to gallop through that city with his ancient carriage behind them, on which was inscribed the punning device" Quo res cumque cadunt, stat linea recta." This vehicle was almost as large as his house. The latter was of the smallest dimensions; and in that small dwelling, he gave small dinners to small parties. The dishes served were in strict keeping with the size of the table, and he generally ate four-fifths of what they contained. This superbly-dressed Amphitryon actually expected that his guests would let their hunger be appeased on the supply he liberally poured forth of brilliant but unsubstantial wit.

According to Johnson, who says that quotation is the watchword of literary men, he was a literary man, for he had ever ready a magazine of citations adapted to all purposes. The variety was some warrant of wide reading; and the Prince was, at all events, not like Pozzo di Borgo, who made the same triad of quotations endure a three-months' duty. At the side of the Prince's little bed, in the very least of libraries, his little commonplace book, on an almost invisible desk, received the brief record of

ideas that visited his gossamer brain.

All around this

room were strewn, in most admired disorder, a mountain of manuscripts, and a wilderness of works on love, philosophy, poetry, and war. Amidst this mass, the old Prince would leap about with the agility of a monkey. Fatigue he never acknowledged, and sleep he little cared for. He would sit up whole nights, half a week through, to read dry works on strategy; and then fall asleep over erotic songs, of which he commenced many, and finished few. Those that he did terminate have as little of the echo of nature as Watteau's shepherdesses have of its aspect. One of the most innocent of his pursuits was to attend at the Opera, and applaud Frederic Venua's pretty music to the pretty ballet of 'Flore et Zéphyre.'

The once young leader of fashion would not lay down his sceptre when he grew old; and as an octogenarian he played, in the eyes of Vienna, an airier "ci-devant jeune homme" than was ever conceived or executed by the inimitable Potier. He could be a boy with the boys; and the old gentleman played heartily at soldiers with the little King of Rome, before that shadow of a monarch grew up to welcome those other favourites, one of whom especially was as fatal to him as the Fornarina to the gifted Raphael.

But the Prince loved to be with young men, and to be thought of by them; and did not love to be reminded either of old-age or of death. His little summer residence at the Kalemberg was the locality whence Sobieski departed to save Austria from the infidel, and to earn for it, what Austria has ever paid to her benefactors, eternal ingratitude. The spirit of the heroic no longer resided there at the period of which I am treating. The walls of the house were covered with the portraits of ladies whose hearts, or what they called such, had yielded to the assaults of De Ligne; and above the portal was inscribed this motto of mingled impiety, mendacity, and impudence :—