mighty has decreed vitality to the Slovack nation. Nearly a thousand years expand their cloudy wings over the fair realm of Rastich, and the oppressed Slavonic nations of Hungary breathe the morning air of a fresh national existence.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE SLOVACKS.

The Daco-Roman stained by blood and debased by ignorance and indolence, repels our sympathy; not so the hardy industrious Slovack that inhabits the north-west of Hungary, from Presburg to Kaschau, from Comorn to the hoar ice-bound summits of those Carpathians that overlook the plain of Cracow. If without the fiery indomitable courage of the Magyar, the variety of his employments shows his ingenuity; he ploughs and harrows the plain, he dresses the vine, he cuts the wood of the forests, his manufactures kept pace with those of Silesia, until the age of overwhelming machinery and capital arrived. He is the industrial Scot of Hungary, who goes forth with his sobriety, industry, and economy, to all the other parts of the kingdom.

Nor can I omit to record that the Slovacks have the glory and the shame of Kossuth, who, endowed with an eminent genius for eloquence, forgot his own blood and his own mother tongue, who makes the humble Hussite pastor of the Carpathians say to the stranger: "What might not a man of Kossuth's genius and eloquence have done for the material and intellectual improvement of the nation, had he adopted the popular side?" And equally remarkable is it, that those venerable Magyar magistrates,

who, headed by Baron Josika, vainly pleaded the cause of the ancient laws and municipal institutions of Hungary at the foot of the throne against the advocates of the bureaucratic centralisation,—were frequently heard to say, "Thank God, the man who has brought our fatherland into this awful crisis is not a Magyar."

I have been for a series of years in communication with the heads of this party, and a few words on the subject of the Slovacks may not be uninteresting at the present time, for, long before the Revolution, while their sufferings were weighing upon them, and Austria had neither the power nor the will to seek support in the popular elements of Hungary, the heads of the Slovacks expressed to me their astonishment that Great Britain, a land of brave and free men, should have sent forth no traveller having a sympathy with so oppressed a nation, which was struggling forward in the career of intellectual culture in spite of such difficulties. I therefore propose to say a few words on the subject of the Slovack question.

Four great families divide the Slaavic world-first of all the Russian, with its varieties of White, Little, and Red; secondly, the Poles; thirdly, the South Slaavic nation (Servia, Croatia, &c.); fourthly, the Tchechs, who have three principal seats, of which the greatest is Bohemia, the second Moravia, and the third the Slovackey.

The Slovack dialect most closely resembles that of the neighbouring Moravia. But from Bohemia came the stimulus to the reformed faith, as well as to the most recent literary development. To this day the Protestant half of the nation uses the Bible of John Huss; and during the twenty years of ultra-Magyar persecution, neither German-Vienna nor Magyarised-Pesth, but Prague, became the literary capital of the Slovackey. Not fiery and violent, but stubborn, is the Slovack. The more the Jesuits of times gone by wished to mould him into a papist, the more he held out; and in modern times, the more the ultra-Magyar fanatic tried to denationalise him, the more enthusiastically he clung to the almost faded memories

of the departed kingdom of his affections, and the more he sought to preserve the recollections of a State that could have had at that period very little claim to civilisation.

It was in the fifth and seventh centuries that the Slaavic nations immigrated from the north-east, and settled themselves in the basin of the Danube, and the Highlands and Islands of the Adriatic. Cyril and Methodius converted the Slovacks to Christianity; and we find in the ninth century this race forming a considerable state called the Kingdom of Great Moravia, of which the present Slovackey was an integral part. We find them agricultural and industrious in peace, and in war defending themselves gallantly and successfully against both the Germans on the west, and Magyars on the east, who had by this time come into Europe from nobody-knows-where, not even Csoma Korosy himself. The great sovereign of this period had a name, the bare mention of which is enough to call forth an unpleasant sensation of redoubtable brute force; and I can easily believe, that it requires no small amount of patriotic ingenuity on the part of the modern bards of the Slovackey, to pack into verse of symetrical proportions, the name of the great SWATOPLUCK.

At length, however, the kingdom of Great Moravia succumbed to the superior vigour and superior numbers of the Magyar hordes; for the kingdom, instead of having been kept together, had been divided by the separate inheritance of brother princes; and even after the fatal battle of Presburg, the kingdom of Great Moravia was not strictly ruled by Magyars, but was tributary to the Magyar Suzerains. At this time the Slovack was not a slave, but a freeman; subsequently, however, feudal legislation was introduced into the Hungarian laws from the German empire. Then came the distinction of noble and villain, but not of Magyar and Slovack, for many of the nobles were Slovacks.

At a more advanced period in history we find Bohemia rising to the rank of a European monarchy, distinguished by a liberal encouragement of learning and literature—

the University of Prague, founded in 1348, was attended by students from all parts of Germany. A century later, this free development bore its fruits in the Hussite movement against Rome, which all the frowns of a Sigismund could not repress; and from the time of Luther, until the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, is often called the golden age of Tchech literature, in which the Slovacks bore an ample part; for Bohemia, being the most westerly Slaavic projection into Europe, after the Germanisation of the March of Brandenburg, had many advantages which were denied to the more easterly brethren, who-more immediately exposed to the Magyar and Turkish supremacy-gradually lost their political independence, although in capability not behind the Bohemians. But the moral and intellectual connexion was kept up.

After the disasters of the Thirty Years' War, however, haughty Protestant Bohemia was dragooned back to Catholicism, and reduced to be a mere German province. Her national literature, which was rather Polemic-Protestant than Belletristic, was extinguished, and a blank of more than a century occurs until the revival took place. And what, thinks the reader, revived this almost extinct language -literature and nationality? The uniformitarian measures of the Emperor Joseph, that well-meaning harbinger of the birch-in-hand professors of the liberalism of the ultraMagyar school, who wished to make people improved and corrected in spite of their necks, by the high hand of despotism.

The first thing that strikes the politician in traversing the various regions under the sway of the house of Habsburg, is their heterogeneous population. In the other large monarchies of Europe, one grand element has swallowed up nearly all the rest. In France, Franks, Celts, and Provençals have been all merged in the modern French. In our own islands we are all Anglo-Saxons, or saxonised Celts and Normans. Parties in a sister island may set up a claim for a separate nationality; but as there are no Celtic Goldsmiths, Burkes, Sheridans, or Moores, and not

a single Celtic newspaper flourishing in the capital, we may be regarded as one people, quoad language and literature. In Prussia, the Wends have totally disappeared from the March of Brandenburg, and, Posen excepted, Prussia is nearly all German. In Russia we find a much greater diversity of population, but still in the midst of them a grand nucleus of population of 40,000,000 people speaking the Russian language, and gradually absorbing the other nationalities.

The states of the house of Habsburg, on the contrary, are of the most varied character, and a catalogue of their crystallised components would be a waste of time. Paris is the national capital of France, and London of Britain; but Vienna is only the seat of the monarch and government of Austria. The Asiatic Magyar, the Frenchified Pole, the Slaavic Tchech, or Croat, paid court to his sovereign in the Burg, but he was not the fellow-countryman of the jovial citizen of Vienna. To imprint a homogeneous character on these heterogeneous populations was one of the great objects of the reign of the Emperor Joseph II., who was quite dazzled by the Paris of the eighteenth century. Its luxury and fashion imposed its laws on all the polite world of Europe. Its literature and men of letters formed a constellation to which the eyes of all the east of Europe were constantly directed. Catherine patronised Diderot. Voltaire was the friend of Frederick. Joseph himself, whose reading was mostly French, was enchanted with the reception he met with at Paris, from all the charming Marmontels and academicians of the period. Joseph resolved to accomplish two great objects-to unfeudalise Austria, and to render Vienna the literary, social and political capital of the whole empire and dependencies.

The unfeudalisation was an immense boon, and was the true commencement of the Austrian revolution (using the word in the re-constructive rather than the destructive sense); but the other part of his scheme-the centralisation of all the threads of government in Vienna, including the abolition of the Hungarian constitution, and the intro