Milan, the ex-King of Servia, died on Monday at Vienna.
Though nearly eleven years have elapsed since his abdication, after a rale as Prince and King of twenty-one years, he was only forty-seven at the time of his death. Born in 1854, and adopted by his second cousin, Prince Michael, the son of Milosh, he succeeded at the age of fourteen, assumed the sovereignty in 1872, and throughout his chequered and ignoble reign treated his kingdom as a cockpit, and its resources as a private milch-cow. He plunged his country into the disastrous war with Bulgaria, scandalised Europe by the squalid melodrama of his married life, and after his unac- countable abdication in 1889 in favour of his son, then a boy of thirteen, continued to harass his country by his injudicious in- terference and intrigues. Ex-Kings have no eulogists, other- wise the most unblushing sycophant would be hard put to it to say anything favourable of this Royal rake. Although he undoubtedly exerted a considerable influence on the Army, even his personal courage was seriously impugned. For the rest, he was extravagant, unscrupulous, and profligate, and he had not even the prestige that attaches to successful intrigue. His own son, the only living being he appeared to care for, y turned against him, and neither wife nor child came near him at the end. It is to be hoped for the sake of Servia's future that he can be correctly described as the worst of the Obrenovitches.
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