Nothing, in fact, can be more dissimilar than the policy long followed by the Austrian government, and that which Schlegel would have recommended, and did in fact recommend. What, especially since the time of the Emperor Joseph II., has characterized the general policy of this government? In respect to ecclesiastical matters, we still see (though the evil was mitigated by the piety of the late emperor), we still see that government, by a restless, encroaching spirit of jealousy, hamper the jurisdiction, and cramp the moral and intellectual energies of the clergy. In relation to the people, its sway is mild and paternal, indeed, but at the same time, intrusive, meddling and vexatious--it is, in short, a dead, mechanical absolutism, where all spontaneity of popular action has been destroyed--all equilibrium of powers overturned--and where royalty, by an irregular attraction, has disturbed, deranged, or compressed the movements of the other social bodies. With respect to science, those best acquainted with the policy of this government affirm, that its patronage is too exclusively confined to the mechanical arts and the physical sciences. In short, no where has the political materialism of the eighteenth century attained a more systematic development than in the Austrian government. Yet in that empire are to be found all the elements of a great social regeneration; and to a minister desirous of earning enduring fame, to a monarch ambitious of living for ever in the hearts of a grateful people, the noblest opportunity is presented for reviving, renovating, and bringing to perfection the free, glorious, but now alas! mutilated and half-effaced institutions of the middle age.
If such is the policy of the Austrian government in relation to the church, to liberty, and to science, it is needless to observe how entirely opposed it was to the views of Schlegel. His whole life was devoted to the cultivation and diffusion of elegant literature and liberal science; and any policy which tended to obstruct their progress, or shackle the energies of the human mind, must have been most adverse to his feelings and wishes. As a sincere friend to religious liberty, as well as a good Catholic, he must have deplored the bondage under which the church groaned; and how ardently attached he was to the cause of popular freedom, how utterly averse from any thing like absolutism in politics, the reader will soon have an opportunity of judging for himself.