When the wretched, worthless and worn-out debauchee Gian Gaston dei Medici, grand duke of Tuscany, died on the 9th of July, 1737, the dynasty of that famous family became extinct.  For some years before his death the prospect of a throne without any heir by right divine to claim it had set the cupidity of sundry of the European crowned heads in motion.  Various schemes and arrangements had been proposed in the interest of different potentates.  But the “vulpine cunning,” as an Italian historian calls it, of Cardinal Fleury, the minister of Louis XV., at length succeeded in inducing the European powers to accede to an arrangement which secured the greater part of the advantage to France.  It was finally settled that the duke of Lorraine should cede to France his ancestral states, which the latter had long coveted, and that he should be married to Maria Teresa, the heiress of the Austrian dominions, carrying in his hand Tuscany, the throne of which was secured to him at the death of Gian Gaston.  It was further promised to the Tuscans, discontented at the prospect of having an absentee sovereign, that on the death of the emperor Francis, Tuscany should have a ruler of its own in the person of his second son.  This Francis, who gave up the duchy of Lorraine to become the husband of Maria Teresa, reigned over Tuscany till his sudden death by apoplexy on the 18th of August, 1765.  His second son, Leopold, reigned in Tuscany till, on the death of his elder brother on the 24th of December, 1789, he was in his turn also called to ascend the imperial throne.  Thereupon the second son of Leopold became grand-duke in 1789, and reigned as Ferdinand III. till 1824, when, on the 18th of June, his son succeeded him as Leopold II.  Now, though the sovereignty of Tuscany was thus entirely and definitively separated from that of Austria, all these princes were of the blood-royal of Austria, and might in the course of Nature have succeeded to the imperial throne.  For this reason they were held, though only dukes of Tuscany, to be entitled to the style and title “imperial and royal,” according to the custom of the House of Austria; and thus every grimy little tobacco-shop and lottery-office in Tuscany, in the days when I first knew it, in 1841, styled itself “imperial and royal.”

The Tuscans had been greatly discontented when the arrangements of the great powers of Europe, entered into without a moment’s thought as to the wishes of the population of the grand duchy on the subject, had decided that they were to be ruled over by a German prince of whom they knew absolutely nothing.  It was not that the later Medici had been popular, or either respected or beloved.  The misgovernment of especially the last two of the Medicean line had reduced the country to the lowest possible social, moral and economical condition.  But yet the change from the known to the utterly unknown was unwelcome to the people.  They feared they knew not what changes and innovations in their old easy-going if