proprietor, either to go through a great deal of drudgery in order to raise his income or to delegate the management of it to others, who, by collusion or peculation, manage to enrich themselves, while there are endless lawsuits about the proportions due to peasant and landlord; for the Szekler is very litigious and obstinate, and I heard at this place of a law-suit about one fowl, the expenses of which amounted to 127. sterling. And I do not believe, from all I have seen in the various customs of Europe, that there is any landed proprietor whose position is equal to those in the lowlands of Scotland and the North of England, who receive their incomes without trouble from a capitalist tenantry, and know almost to a certainty what their income is. As for the landed proprietor in Hungary and Transylvania, the worry and vexation of such a system, and the certainty of being deceived, perhaps ruined, if a diligent supervision be relaxed, renders his position the reverse of the easy life of what we associate with the idea of landed proprietory.

At Keresthur the day slipped rapidly away in the society of my host and hostess, the lady being acquainted with English and French literature, and rather complaining that her lot was cast so far away from the brilliant intellectual circles of the capitals of Europe, while I was all curiosity to learn how they had felt during the war.

"It was a dreadful time," said the lady. "We escaped as far as life and our homes were concerned, but the year of perpetual terror and anxiety has made me at least ten years older in constitution; and yet, we ought to be thankful for having escaped the fate of so many others. You are a young man, and I will not waste wishes on your being a rich or a great man, but if you are disposed for the best specimen of my good will that my experience has furnished, God preserve your country from a murderous civil war of race against race, class against class, and religion against religion."

In the afternoon Baron G-, the son-in-law of this worthy couple, took me out to see the village, in which

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is a Unitarian college and church, for this is one of the four established religions in Transylvania; this principality being, as far as I have been able to learn, the only portion of Europe, with the exception of Switzerland, in which this sect has a distinct recognition by the state; and, at first sight, this looks like a more enlarged spirit of toleration than would be congenial even to the feelings of a large portion of the Protestants of Great Britain; but any scheme of religious equality in Transylvania, which excludes the Greek faith of the Daco-Romans, is like the tragedy of Hamlet, with the part of Hamlet omitted. There are thirty-six Unitarian churches in the curule session of Udvarhely; and in the one which I visited at Keresthur, I found an organ, but no altar; and in the library, many English books, presented by the London Unitarian Association. The Szekler Protestants are all either Calvinistic or Unitarian, and are, as far as I could learn, without Lutherans; and as the Saxons are almost all of this confession, Lutheranism is denominated by the Szekler, Szas walas, or Saxon religion; and Luther is to this day regarded by the whole Saxon race in Transylvania with a sympathy, veneration, and affection, which three centuries have scarcely cooled.

As we are on the topic of religion, I may mention, as an instance of the petty fanaticism which politico-religionism engenders to the detriment of the christianity of Christ, that close crafts or guilds flourish in all their exclusiveness at Udvarhely, and that Catholics and Calvinists are quite agreed in shutting out Lutherans and Unitarians as much as possible from their guilds, and even until within the last twenty years, not even a Calvinist could be a bootmaker in Udvarhely, which is an important trade, as all the men and women here wear these large boots. This was in consequence of a by-law that every bootmaker must have a crucifix in his shop. The obligatory crucifix fell at length into desuetude and Calvinist bootmakers were admitted, but they were equally ready to join with the Catholics in excluding Lutherans and Unitarians, on

various shabby pretexts, such as declaring that the boots are not well made. It is to be hoped that the new organisation will put an end to these abuses.

When I was at Udvarhely, Baron Heydte, the new governor, was going on as well as could be wished; his first step was to improve communications, for the road to Schässburg was an ad libitum track in the plain, almost impassable in bad weather; but he collected, in the course of the autumn, 1500 labourers, with 300 carts, dug two parallel trenches, and scattering gravel from the neighbouring river in the middle of the road, made a welldrained practicable road, over which I passed in thaw weather, so well as to excite my surprise.

On this line of road I saw the celebrated field of Egyagfalva, on which the national assemblies of the Szeklers are held, and which is a plain, situated between the road and a hill. Here was held, in 1506, the National Assembly, in which, after a revolt caused by the levying of the sixth ox throughout the realm on the birth of an heir to the crown, according to ancient custom, the Szekler nation renewed its fealty to the sovereign. There in 1848, on the 16th of October, 60,000 Szeklers assembled to resist the Daco-Roman insurrection. The meeting in question was harangued by Berzentzy, a fiery agitator of great eloquence, and as an instance of the phrenzy of the occasion, I may mention that a platform forty feet high had been erected, and that a man standing on it cried out, "I will throw myself from the platform, and if I am killed the Magyar cause is lost, but if I escape alive the Magyars and Szeklers will gain the day." On this he leaped from the scaffold and was not killed, and having been cured of his fractures, is, I believe, still alive.

In short all parties seemed to have taken leave of their sober senses, and when the mind seeks for revolutionary parallels to what has passed during the Kossuth orgies of liberty, it goes rather to the spurious sentimentality of the Palais Royal, in the days of Camille Desmoulins, and

Barrere, than to the plain unvarnished acts and facts and natural dignity of the English revolutionists of the seventeenth century.

I now quitted the vale of the Great Kokel, and crossed over to that of the Little Kokel, and put up at the solitary inn at the passage, the accomodation as usual being very scanty. The inn-keeper was a Bohemian tailor; the tap-room was his work-shop, and at the same time the kitchen of the establishment. So that the goose revolving at the spit had a double reposing on the shopboard. There was but one table for the accommodation of the guests, and I had for messmates my own coachman, three drunken Szekler peasants, and a female camp-follower, who had gone through all the campaign, and was a fierce and determined enemy of the house of Habsburg and of the traitor Georgey in particular, whose base surrender had produced considerable havoc in her revenues. coachman spoke Magyar, I afterwards asked him why he did not join in conversation with the Szeklers? But he said, with a surprise something like alarm, "Good God, sir, how could you suppose that I could ever grease myself with them; for if we begin ever so civily, we end in blows." The Saxon has not the deficiency of manly courage which disfigures the Daco-Roman, but he certainly does not possess the warlike energy of the Szekler, and an officer of the army told me, that if you put a Szekler, a Saxon, and a Daco-Roman into the same prison together,

As my

you will find, after the lapse of three days, that the Saxon is the master of the Daco-Roman, but the Szekler is the master of the Saxon.

The road then ascends a considerable chain of hills, and, after a similar descent, I found myself once more in the principal basin of the Maros. At the foot of the hill is the spot on which the meetings of the Szeklers of the session of Maros-vasarhely were held, and, at every step, I see reason to believe that the King's name is a "tower of strength" in this country. At a great meeting of Szeklers, held to concert measures to resist the DacoRomans, the people were not satisfied with the oath to the King of Hungary, but insisted on the name of the Emperor being also added. With a little more timely energy on the part of the Austrian military authorities, the efforts of the emissaries of Kossuth would have failed, for nearly all the wealthy landed proprietors were against the political union with Hungary, and against the disruption of the military union with Austria. But, by a strange perversity, the Austrian troops were concentrated at Herrmanstadt, which was well affected, and at Clausenburg, which was the focus of the revolutionary party, the government of the principality, composed of loyalists, was left with an inadequate supply of military.

Maros-vasarhely is, at the present time, the principal seat of the Szekler property and intelligence, and is very superior to Udvarhely, which is the ancient capital of the Szeklers, and was, up to 1790, the session that had the precedence of the others, and which has also the advantage of a more central position in the Szekler-land; but Maros-vasarhely is the real capital of the Szeklers, being a place of 20,000 inhabitants, with a large square, in the middle of which is a handsome ornamental fountain, and around it many good modern houses, as in the Magyar towns of Hungary, standing cheek by jowl with old, wooden, Turkish-looking cabins, which look like those eye-sores, called condemned houses, in a half-built new quarter of

a town.