CHAPTER XVIII.

CLAUSENBURG CONTINUED-MR. PAGET-CLAUSENBURG STUDIES -THE LUTHERAN PASTOR-THE DEATH OF ROTH-CON

CLUDING POLITICAL REFLECTIONS-THE

MENT OF TRANSYLVANIA.

FUTURE GOVERN

The female society of Clausenburg is most agreeable, being musical and not unliterary; while all the principal families being well acquainted with each other, there is a total absence of coldness and formality; but however agreeable my reminiscences may have been, it would be malapropos to introduce any of the charming Clausenburgers personally to the public. But in the midst of tableaux or of music there was always something to carry the mind away from the festivity of the moment, to the tremendous catastrophe of the revolution. One lady was in mourning for a relation that had died on the field of battle; another, who had escaped poignant grief, was under the wearing anxieties of having a relative in a state of untersuchung, -either under actual inquiry for part taken in the revolution, or out on parole, or under surveillance. One evening I said of a young lady of great beauty, that her timidity and silence prevented me from forming an estimate of her character. On which her father said, "I don't know much about her timidity. When the Roman hordes broke out, she was the very first of the family to provide herself with a pair of pistols, learned their use, and kept them in perfect order until the end of the war."

In the course of my residence at Clausenburg I heard many and high estimations of the character and talents of Mr. Paget, the author of "Hungary and Transylvania," who had bought property in this part of the country, which had been ravaged by the Daco-Romans, and I can bear my testimony as a fellow-countryman, long and widely travelled in Hungary, to the great value of his work, and to the large amount of valuable information on the history,

geography, resources and manners of Hungary in general, and of the Magyars in particular. Whoever reads through the present work may easily perceive in what my political opinions differ from his, and will not be surprised at my entertaining the belief, that he has committed a serious error in looking at the different nations of Hungary rather through Magyar spectacles than through a merely neutral medium; which, under all circumstances, is scarcely to be expected from a foreigner, who, settling in Hungary, makes a semi-adoption of one nationality in preference to hearing all nations tell their own story, and collating, contrasting, and analysing them. But Mr. Paget is a conscientious opponent; and although he does not share my opinions on the best way of furthering the interests of Great Britain on the Danube, in relation to the integrity of the Ottoman empire, yet no work has appeared on Hungary and Transylvania which gives so much valuable and special information on the Magyar nation. My estimate of the warlike qualities of the Magyar race is quite as high as his, nor do I yield to him in sympathy with the superior ease and sincerity of the tone of Magyar society; and undoubtedly and unquestionably, although he was a Transylvanian landed proprietor, his opinions on the subject of the sanctity of the rights of property cannot be of a more unswervingly religious character than mine. Nor is he more sensible than I am of the weaknesses and defects of Austria, past and present. But after as large and practical an experience of the Austrian and Ottoman empires in all their internal and external relations as usually falls to the lot of a British subject, I feel persuaded, that Mr. Paget, and those who think with him, underrated the toughness of the Austrian empire as much as they overrated the capability of the Magyar nation to absorb the other elements in Hungary; for, as Lord Bacon says, "There remaineth only to remember out of the grounds of nature the two conditions of perfect mixture, whereof the former is time; for the natural philosophers say well, that compositio is opus hominis, and

mistio, opus naturæ. For it is the duty of man to make a fit application of bodies together; but the perfect fermentation of them must be left to time and nature; and unnatural hasting thereof doth disturb the work and not dispatch it."

My time in Clausenburg was divided by studies of the past and the present, hearing from one party a vindication of the union of Hungary and Transylvania on the footing of Magyar supremacy; from Daco-Romans, Germans, and Austrians, the reverse; and from conservative Magyar and landed proprietors, complaints of the sufferings inflicted by both extremes on the unoffending moderates, who wished to see the domain of property and intelligence neither subjected to imperial martial law, nor invaded by city democracy nor agrarian barbarism. The massacre of Zalatna by the Daco-Roman hordes was most frequently brought upon the tapis by the opponents of that nation. I heard from the lips of Baron Kemeny, the lieutenant of the county, the account of this deplorable catastrophe, and one morning he called on me at the hotel, with a little boy in his hand, who could not be above seven or eight years of age, and taking off his cap he showed me a large white mark without hair, where a Daco-Roman lance had been driven into the skull and the boy left for dead, having recovered by mere chance, a part of the skull having been actually knocked out. His father, Johann Nemegya, had been head of the mining administration at Zalatna, and it appears to have been plunder, and plunder alone, that attracted the Daco-Roman hordes, who on the 22nd of October, 1848, surrounded the town, set it on fire, and signalised the sack of the place by a massacre of 640 persons, either there or on the march to Karlsburg. At a place called Praszaka, the people of Zalatna passed the night on a boggy meadow, surrounded by the hordes, whom they heard in council as to whether they should be killed or not; and in the morning, one Juliana Bihary, who had a thousand ducats in her girdle, being searched and the money scattered on the ground, this served as

a signal for the final massacre, in which the administrator, before mentioned, the father of the boy, was shot down and attempted to escape into the wood, with his little son in his hand and his wife grievously wounded.

Had every one of these monsters, who, summoned to combat rebellion, disgraced and degraded the loyalist cause, by the gratification of their individual mercenary appetites,-been consigned to the gallows, no moral stain would have rested on the ultra-Magyar bloody tribunal of Clausenburg; but its insane national fanaticism--its confounding of innocent with guilty must ever remain a black spot in the history of Transylvania. One day the Saxon pastor called upon me, and we visited the spot where the Reverend Mr. Roth, the Lutheran clergyman of Meschen, in the Saxon land, and who was looked up to by the whole nation for his piety and benevolencemet a felon's doom.

Clausenburg is picturesquely situated on a plain surrounded by hills, partly wooded, and with villas and plantations scattered all around. It was now the month of January, and therefore the trees were in their wintry skeletons, a white robe of snow covered all the hills around, as well as the roofs of the town, as we slowly ascended a steep acclivity that led up an eminence, crowned by a fort that commanded the town. It was when we had toiled to the top and taken breath to look all around, that I heard the accounts, which the pastor gave me, of his pious and venerable colleague. He was in no way mixed up either directly or indirectly in the atrocities we have described; but for years before the revolution he had been by all fair arguments a champion of the nationality of his own people against the newfangled efforts to absorb two-thirds of the people of Hungary and Transylvania into the nationality of the third. Kossuth, a born Slovack who renegaded from his own illustrious nationality, is the popular hero in England, although he strangled almost at its birth the constitutional principle in Austria by the bow-string of Repeal. But, according

to my humble opinion, the true moral heroes of Hungary are those noble souls of the Croat, Slovack, Saxon, and other nationalities, who stood forth as the champions of Hungarian nationalities and liberties for a period of a quarter century, and who fought the good fight with the weapons of history, of equity, morality, and Christianity. Such were Kollar and Gay; Schaffarik, Roth and Stur; they have neither high-sounding titles, nor lands broad and wide; but neither had Luther nor Melanchthon, Loyola nor Xavier this adventitious lustre. But they had true souls -they loved their species; they loved their mothertongue and their nationality; they neither sought to make them dominate over other nationalities, nor would they, as citizens of a free country, patiently submit to extinction of nationalities, as high, as noble, and as ancient as the Magyar.

Roth had read history: he knew that it was to the Germanic element, and to the old German empire, that Hungary and Transylvania were indebted for their liberation from the Turkish yoke, and constantly declared that his objection was not to the Magyars having a sympathy for their own liberty and nationality, but to their antipathy to the liberty and nationality of the other races. Such was his unswerving course during the struggles of his life, and such his noble and patriotic language in the melancholy glory of martyrdom. For he had been long marked out as an object of hatred by the ultra-Magyar faction; and on the most frivolous pretexts, of which even a Fouquier Tinville would have been ashamed, he was condemned to death; and, in the few hours allowed him to prepare for another world, he penned the following lines:

"DEAR CHILDREN,-I have just been condemned to death, and in three hours the sentence will be executed. If anything pains me, it is the thought that you, who are without a mother, will now be without a father; but powerless in the hands of the force that leads me to the shambles, I yield to my fate, and to the will of God, by whom even my hairs are counted.