It is a letter very characteristic of the writer, as showing that neither time nor distance could chill her affection for her family; and that the attainment of royal authority had in no degree extinguished her habitual feeling of duty:  that it had even strengthened it by making its performance of importance not only to herself, but to others.  Nor is the jealousy for the reputation of the French people, and the desire so warmly professed that they should have won her brother’s favorable opinion, less becoming in a queen of France; while, to descend to minor points, the neatness and felicity of the language may be admitted to prove, if her education had been incomplete when she left Austria, with how much pains, since her progress had depended on herself, she had labored to make up for its deficiencies.  That she should have asked her brother, as she here mentions, to leave her his advice in writing, is a practical proof that her expression of an earnest desire to do her duty was not a mere form of words; while the resolution which she avows never to forget his admonitions shows a genuine humility and candor, a sincere desire to be told of and to amend her faults, which one is hardly prepared to meet with in a queen of one-and-twenty.  For Joseph did not spare her, nor forbear to set before her in the plainest light those parts of her conduct which he disapproved.  He told her plainly that if in France people paid her respect and observance, it was only as the wife of their king that they honored her; and that the tone of superiority in which she sometimes allowed herself to speak of him was as ill-judged as it was unbecoming.  He hinted his dissatisfaction at her conduct toward him as her husband in a series of questions which, unless she could answer as he wished, must, even in her own judgment, convict her of some failure in her duties to him.  Did she show him that she was wholly occupied with him, that her study was to make him shine in the opinion of his subjects without any thought of herself?  Did she stifle every wish to shine at his expense, to be affable when he was not so, to seem to attend to matters which he neglected?  Did she preserve a discreet silence as to his faults and weaknesses, and make others keep silence about them also?  Did she make excuses for him, and keep secret the fact of her acting as his adviser?  Did, she study his character, his wishes?  Did she take care never to seem cold or weary when with him, never indifferent to his conversation or his caresses?

The other matters on which the emperor chiefly dwells were those on which Mercy, and, by Mercy’s advice, Maria Teresa also, had repeatedly pressed her.  But those questions of Joseph’s set plainly before us some of his young sister’s difficulties and temptations, and, it must be confessed, some points in which her conduct was not wholly unimpeachable in discretion, even though her solid affection for her husband never wavered for a moment.  In some respects