This article examines Liberal attitudes towards the Austrian state, in the years between the European revolutions of 1848 and the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. Much Liberal commentary in this period treated Austria as an antagonistic, autocratic menace, as had become conventional since Waterloo. But the 1850s and 1860s also saw the growth of a more substantial interest in the architecture of the Habsburg monarchy. Its transition from despotism to constitutionalism was used to affirm some of the basic claims of mid-Victorian Liberalism, and even to suggest solutions to broader problems in modern politics. At a time when Ireland and the overseas empire were posing serious political difficulties, moreover, British writers also began to find analogies between the Britain and Austrian imperial projects. This article explores how Liberal thinkers and commentators responded to two decades of rapid, complex, and sometimes contradictory changes in the shape of the Austrian state. It deals both with the periodical press, and with the developed analyses outlined by the historian Lord Acton and the political philosopher John Stuart Mill.