The third son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland (brother of Napoleon), and Hortense Beauharnais, daughter of the Empress Josephine by her first marriage, he was born in Paris, in the palace of the Tuileries, April 20, 1808.

Ever since the Empress Catherine II., the encroachments and territorial aggrandizement of this great military empire had been going on.

The internal affairs of the empire were more and more interfered with and controlled by the Catholic Church, through the intrigues and influence of the empress, a bigoted Spanish Catholic,and this was another source of unpopularity, for France was not a priest-ridden country, and the emperor was blamed for the growing ecclesiastical power in civil affairs.

Count Bismarck craftily lured on his prey, who was already goaded forward by his home war-party, with the empress at their head; negotiations ceased, and Napoleon III.

With the empress-dowager he was an especial favorite, and was just the sort of man whom the autocrat of all the Russias would naturally like, especially for his love of hunting, and his success in shooting deer and bears.

He showed extraordinary tact in everything, and in nothing more than in giving a new title to the Queen as Empress of India.

Yet here again the methods of the Russian Empress were less vile than those of the Prussian King.

His one formidable antagonist was the Empress; and long experience, he tells us, enabled him to judge whether difficulties in persuading the old Kaiser to adopt a given line of policy were due to his own judgment or conceived "in the interests of domestic peace."

[6208]Pertinax the Emperor, when one told him a fiddler was too familiar with his empress, made no reckoning of it.

Decking the thistly turf, and arid hill, Unseenlet the majestic Dahlia Glitter, an Empress, in her blazonry Of beauty; let the stately Lily shine, As snow-white as the breast of the proud Swan, Sailing upon the blue lake silently, That lifts her tall neck higher, as she views The shadow in the stream!

Claudius, who had returned home, and had recovered some of his facile equanimity in the pleasures of the table, showed signs of relenting; but Narcissus knew that delay was death, and on his own authority sent a tribune and centurions to despatch the Empress.

But Agrippina, by the use of means the most unscrupulous, prevailed over all her rivals, and managed her interests with such consummate skill that, before many months had elapsed, she had become the spouse of Claudius and the Empress of Rome.

Scattering or seizing the slaves who came in their way, and bursting their passage from door to door, they found the Empress in a dimly-lighted chamber, attended only by a single handmaid.

To obtain soldiers sufficient to fill up the vacancies in his army which had been decimated by the plague, he was forced to enrol slaves; and to obtain money he had to sell the ornaments of the palace, and even some of the Empress's jewels.

The Empress, seeking to learn the reason for it, is infected by Wirtemberg's suspicions.

" I made the round of the Holy Sepulchre on Sunday, while the monks were celebrating the festival of the Invention of the Cross, in the chapel of the Empress Helena.

As the finding of the cross by the Empress is almost the only authority for the places inclosed within the Holy Sepulchre, I went there inclined to doubt their authenticity, and came away with my doubt vastly strengthened.

After seeing this, you are taken to the Pillar of Flagellation; the stocks; the place of crowning with thorns; the spot where He met His mother; the cave where the Empress Helena found the cross; and, lastly, the summit of Mount Calvary.

One of the last and most brilliant fêtes given here was that given by the King of Saxony to the Emperor Napoleon just before the Russian campaign, at which the Emperor and Empress of Austria and most of the Sovereigns of Germany assisted, to do hommage to the great Conqueror.

We believe that the Empress Catherine corresponded with him; and we know that the Emperor Alexander called upon him, and presented him with his miniature in a gold snuff-box, which the philosopher, to his eternal honour, returned.

Some of these are women, like the Empress of Austria, who were justly famed for a beauty which is not often the gift of royalty.

We all enthusiastically bought photographs of the painting of the Empress Elizabeth at the age of eighteen, which to my mind is one of the most exquisite faces ever put upon canvas, and then, highly elated with our presentation of Munich to Mrs. Jimmie and Bee, we gaily wended our way southward, following the river Isar for a time, until we reached Innsbruck, on our way to the Achensee.

Jimmie obligingly took us at once to the Hofkirche, to get to which we passed under the Triumphal Gate, erected by the citizens on the occasion of the entry of the Emperor Francis I. and the Empress Maria Theresa, to commemorate the marriage of Prince Leopold, who afterward became the Emperor Leopold II., with the Infanta Maria Ludovica.

It was not the season when we arrived in Vienna, but we had letters to the old Countess von Schimpfurmann, who had been lady-in-waiting to the Empress Elizabeth when she first came to the court of Austria, a mere slip of a girl, with that marvellous hair of hers whose length was the wonder of Europe, dressed high for the first time, but oftenest flowing silkily to the hem of her skirt.

The old countess had numerous anecdotes to tell of the beautiful Empress, all of which confirmed and strengthened my belief that she was most of all a glorious woman gloriously misunderstood by her nearest and dearest.