25th of April, their columns closely investing the fortress, the gates were shut.

The garrison, including the corps of Leiningen, amounted to 8,659 men, of whom 4,494 were recruits, under the command of General Rukavina, a grey-haired veteran of eighty, who, sixty summers before, stood sentry as a private at the very palace where he subsequently commanded the forces. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak—Leiningen and a colonel Stankovich were the soul of the defence. The great deficiency was in engineer officers, artillery, and artillery-men. Instead of ten engineer officers, which is the complement of the fortress, they had, owing to the Hungarian and the Italian wars, only three; and, instead of 390 cannon, only 213. Of the garrison, no less than 1,500 were Magyars, 600 of them being Szeklers of Transylvania, the most enthusiastic for their nationality, and yet during the whole siege they behaved with most unflinching fidelity.

The water which supplied the garrison was all brought from without, and raised by a machine in the Fabrik suburb. The first attempt of the Magyars was, therefore, to cut off the water; but immediately all the old wells were cleared out, which produced a tolerably potable water. The Bega makes a circuit to the south of the town, and in the intervening meadows was an imperialist fortified camp, covered by the guns of the fortress; but the river itself was soon turned aside by the Magyars, through the instrumentality of sluices made some miles higher up; so that instead of a river, it became a bog, its banks forming a trench to the besiegers.

The garrison being now anxious for intelligence, various plans were proposed to this effect, and that of a sharpshooter accepted; who, suggesting that a road through the wood to the north was likely to be passed by the messengers of the Magyars, was allowed to take a few men with him by night, who lying hid in the wood until they saw a person pass whom they believed to be a courier, dashed out upon and seized him, and brought him alive

of a most violent reaction in favour of the resuscitation of Slavonic and Roman nationalities; for scarcely had the thunders of the French war died away, when Bohemia seemed to re-awake to what her literature and nationality had been before the unhappy thirty years' war, and the enthusiasm spread gradually through the Slavonic provinces of Hungary.

I convinced myself so far back as 1839, that a reaction, fatal to the Magyar race, must be the inevitable result; for this ultra-Magyarism, producing the duplex effect of raising up a barrier between Hungary and the rest of the Austrian empire, and of irritating the other nations, instinct rendered Austria and the non-Maygar nations of Hungary natural allies; so that if the life's blood of Austria on the Croat military frontier, which is the nursery of her infantry, had not been drained off to Lombardy, ultraMagyarism would have stood no chance in a struggle with Austria; and, as it is, the Magyars are now in a worse position than they would have been had they simply contented themselves with removing the gross abuses which caused Hungary to present so great a contrast to the rest of the empire, and attempted neither a disruption of the union with Austria, nor the abasement of the other nationalities.

Of all the extraordinary hallucinations that have possessed the people of England, this ultra-Magyarism is the most extraordinary; and the cause of the present prostrate condition of this noble nation is (and I cannot repeat it too often), not the love of liberty, but the love of domination, not patriotism, or love of country and its numerous nations, but national egotism, or the love of their own nation carried to an excess incompatible either with the self-love of the other nations, or the cohesion of the empire, with which they had a financial and military, although not a legislative connexion,-not the real abolition of feudalism, by equal taxation of noble and ignoble, by the extension of communications across rivers and through the steppes, by the removal of a corrupt magistracy and

the elevation of the people, by education in their own language and in their own religion, but by the sham abolition of feudalism, by the spoliation of the landowner's property, by taking from him a considerable portion of the interest of the purchase-money of his estates, with some loose, vague, will-o'-the-wisp assurance of compensation.

The tables are turned; and yet, let Austria beware of turning Hungary into a larger Poland, and remember, that centralisation is quite unsuited to the character of the Magyars, who, although small in number, are unquestionably one of the most warlike races in the monarchy; and that the obligate complement of an imperial legislature is a free developmeut of municipal liberty among the nations of Hungary.

The house at Gross St. Miklos was only one story high; one side being next the street of the town, and the other opening on the park and pleasure-ground, divided by a branch of the Maros: but the out-houses, appendages, establishment for breeding horses, with an almost royal stable for a couple of hundred horses, were all new, and bore no resemblance to the homely establishments on the Theiss. This is one of the true directions that Hungarian patriotism ought to take. Man is certainly born for something besides mere material civilisation. There are nobler instincts which must be followed; but, as one of the first laws of every corporate system is to preserve a balance, to stimulate what is languid, to give a sedative to what is agitated, it is a thousand pities that the Magyars as a nation, en bloc, are not more sensible of their marked deficiency in civilisation, merely material, and the disproportion between their florid political rhetoric, and their retrograde arts, commerce, and agriculture; and how much more Hungary stands in need of the fructifying empire of science over matter, than the paltry domination of one language over others, which, even although less logical in grammar, less musical in vocabulary, are the broad portals to the science and literature of modern Europe.

TEMESVAR-INJURY

CHAPTER VII.

OF

DONE BY BOMBARDMENT- HISTORY TEMESVAR-THE GREAT SQUARE-GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF TEMESVAR-THE FORTIFICATIONS-THE SUBURBS.

As we approach Temesvar the road becomes macadamised and passable, even after the heaviest rains; and at one place I thought myself almost in a town: a gentleman's residence, with the offices and the inn at which we dined forming an octagon, almost embracing the road, and, being symmetrically planted with trees, had a most pleasing effect; but, as I approached the town itself, I in vain looked for the noble alleys of trees that used to be the delight and ornament of the place; all had been hewn down by the grim axe of war, the fortifications covered with the marks of cannon-balls, and the roofs of the houses within battered to the bare rafters, or altogether roofless. I went from one inn to another, and at each got the same answer: "Our bed-rooms are all destroyed by the shells; but if you are a new official, we expect to have some rooms ready before the severity of winter sets in." Cold comfort this for a traveller, who, after roughing it, expected a little convenience on arrival at the capital of the duchy. At last the landlord of the "Golden Ox" took compassion on me, and permitted me to sleep in his own room until one was vacant.

Temesvar, with a population of 24,000, is the capital of Southern Hungary, and the seat of its civilisation, and owes its existence to the resolution to transport a readymade European city into the heart of the newly conquered province. Most of the other towns of Hungary preserved many of their old houses until well on in the last century; and even to this day, Szegedin, with its old Turkish fort, its Franciscan Gothic church, where, in 1450, Mathaeus Corvinus held a Diet, its Bulgarian-looking streets, with here and there a new white house of several

stories, like a cotton-factory, is a cross breed between the Asiatic and the European-the middle age and the modern; but Temesvar is quite French. Its situation is much better than Szegedin as regards salubrity; and a large bird's-eye view of the town, as it was in the time of the Turks, shows it to have been then entirely surrounded by marshes, except to the north. The river Bega, which now forms an ellipse to the south of the town, then flowed through the centre of it, forming numerous islands. And even now fevers abound. If we ascend to the Observatory tower, a wide champaign prospect of cultivated, but far from perfectly-drained, fields and villages is seen all around, and no hills are visible, except on a clear day, to the eastward in the direction of Transylvania, where the last spurs of the Carpathians appear like a cloud on the horizon.

The town itself when handed over to Prince Eugene of Savoy on the 13th of October, 1716, consisted of four parts; the inner town of wooden houses (only the mosques and the powder magazine being of stone) surrounded with a wall and a ditch; then the castle of the Hunyady family, a middle age fortress, connected with the town by a drawbridge and forming the citadel; and to the north, east, and west, the so-called great and small Palanka, not walled but pallisaded. The inner town has entirely disappeared; and a single house in the middle of the town is pointed out as the place of the old Turkish gate, where Eugene made his triumphal entry, which spot is still called the Eugens-thor. The palaces and symmetrical streets of Temesvar. are in the style of Louis Quatorze; for although the reign of Charles VI., was contemporary with that of his great-grandson, Louis Quinze; and although most of the edifices were built between 1730-40, the mouldings are mostly of the style of Louis Quatorze, whom it was the great ambition of Charles to imitate; so firmly fixed was the French taste, long after the death of the Grand Monarque himself.

Even the mosques which were built of stone have disappeared; two of them immediately after the conquest,