Strauss was in all his glory; the long-drawn impassioned breathings of Lanner having ceased for ever, the dulcet hilarity of his rival now reigns supreme; and his music, when directed by himself, still abounds in those exquisite little touches, that inspire hope like the breath of a May morning.  Strange to say, the intoxicating waltz is gone out of vogue with the humbler classes of Vienna,—­its natal soil.  Quadrilles, mazurkas, and other exotics, are now danced by every “Stubenmad’l” in Lerchenfeld, to the exclusion of the national dance.

On the third day after this, at the appointed hour, I waited upon Prince Metternich.  In the outer antechamber an elderly well-conditioned red-faced usher, in loosely made clothes of fine black cloth, rose from a table, and on my announcing myself, said, “If you will go into that apartment, and take a seat, his Excellency will be disengaged in a short time.”  I now entered a large apartment, looking out on the little garden of the bastion:  an officer, in a fresh new white Austrian uniform, stood motionless and pensive at one of the windows, waiting his turn with a most formidable roll of papers.  The other individual in the room was a Hungarian, who moved about, sat down, and rose up, with the most restless impatience, twirled his mustachios, and kept up a most lively conversation with a caged parrot which stood on the table.

Two large pictures, hanging from the wall opposite the windows, were a full length portrait of the emperor in his robes, the other a picture of St. John Nepomuck, the patron saint of Bohemia, holding an olive branch in his hand.  The apartment, although large, was very simply furnished, but admirably decorated in subdued colours, in the Italian manner.  A great improvement has lately taken place in internal decoration in Vienna, which corresponds with that of external architecture.  A few years ago, most large apartments were fitted up in the style of Louis XV., which was worthy of the degenerate nobles and crapulous financiers for whom it was invented, and was, in fact, a sort of Byzantine of the boudoir, which succeeded the nobler and simpler manner of the age of Louis XIV., and tormenting every straight line into meretricious curves, ended with over-loading caricature itself.

I found Prince Metternich in his cabinet, surrounded with book-cases, filled mostly with works on history, statistics, and geography, and I hope I am not committing any indiscretion in saying that his conversation savoured more of the abstractions of history and political philosophy than that of any other practical statesman I had seen.  I do not think that I am passing a dubious compliment, since M. Guizot, the most eminently practical of the statesmen of France, is at the same time the man who has most successfully illustrated the effects of modifications of political institutions on the main current of human happiness.