served as a temporary hospital, succeeded that, on the night of the 30th July, of the two barracks at Peterwardein gate, when the fire-men, exhausted by twelve hours' previous exertions, allowed the whole mass to burn to the ground; and a loss quite as painful to the besieged under such circumstances, was that of one of the only three engineer officers in the garrison, the brave Colonel Simonich, who, while making dispositions to have the fire extinguished, had his breast bones burst in by a shell splinter, which proved fatal. The hospital was not only full, but in such a state that the air was pestilential, the sick and wounded preferring to remain without surgical assistance, to entering the hospital.

The Hungarians now calculating that the garrison was exhausted, and anxious to anticipate the imperialist forces in an attempt to raise the siege, stormed the pallisades with a view to possess themselves of the works in front of Peterwardein gate, but were beaten off in spite of the extraordinary bravery and impetuosity, with which the attack was made. A curious ruse on this night produced the retreat of the Magyars: - An imperialist, Captain Metz, going out to the left, with the drummers and a few soldiers, they beat the drums and made loud hurrahs, so that the Magyars supposing that they were taken in flank, retired in confusion. The day after, the cholera broke out in the town with the utmost violence, and increased so rapidly that the garrison began to melt away, some days the number of deaths being as high as one hundred and sixty; but Haynau was already in Szegedin, unknown to the garrison, who were now in a state of perfect ignorance of the state of the war. 66 Not one of us," said one of the garrison to me, "regarded his life as worth a day's purchase." At length, on the 5th August, being the hundredth day of the siege, Count Vecsey offered a capitulation with all the honours of war, in. consideration, as he said, of the gallant defence. This was peremptorily rejected, with the announcement that the garrison would defend itself to the last man. Next morning the officers looking from the

tower of observation in the barracks, saw that several batteries were deserted, and the low distant booming of artillery in the west, announced that a large and friendly force was not far off. The gallant Rukavina would fain have ordered a sortie as a diversion, but wounds and death, typhus and cholera, had so reduced the once strong garrison, that 1,233 infantry, and 388 cavalry could alone be mustered, and to risk them was to surrender the garrison. On the 9th, the cannon being louder and louder, they knew that a great battle was fought to the west, the sally was resolved on, and on the same evening. Haynau, after his victory at Kis Becskerek, entered Temesvar; and thus ended the siege of one hundred and seven days.

The hoary Rukavina did not survive; like the lamp that blazes up in its socket before extinction, the concluding efforts exhausted him, and he died of cholera brought on by fatigue. So the chequers of death and victory marked the close of his long and eventful professional career, but the goal was reached, nor is the soldier to be deplored, who after a life of eighty years, can say in the hour of death:-"My end has been fully attained:”

"REQUIESCAT IN PACE!"

CHAPTER IX.

THE VOYVODINA-GREAT HISTORICAL LANDMARK-SERVIA IN THE MIDDLE AGES-SERVIAN FUNDAMENTAL DIPLOMATHE SERVIAN REVOLUTION-RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF VOYVODINA.

It is certainly a singular spectacle that the south of Hungary and the north of Turkey-in-Europe has presented in the nineteenth century. A great portion of the south 4

PATON. II.

Slavonic family, which for numerous generations had been in a state of servitude, bursts up through the superincumbent cake of Asiatic supremacy, and with haughty modesty demands from Europe admission into the list of nations. In the year that Napoleon assumed the imperial crown, Cara George began the emancipation of a portion of the inheritance of King Lasar from the direct rule of the Porte; and 1849-50, which saw his nephew elevated to the presidency of the French republic, witnessed on the north side of the Danube, the emancipation of the Servians of the Austrian empire from ultra-Magyar coercion, and the re-establishment of the Voyvodina, or Servian duchy, dormant since 1691.

The year 1684 had been that of the turning of the tide, and of the receding of the waters, for then the Emperor of Germany with the assistance of the North Slavonic Sobieski, prepared for the resuscitation of the South Slavonic nationality. The Emperor Leopold after having seen Hungary cleared of the Turks, sent to the Servian nation a diploma, inviting them to leave Servia and settle in Hungary, as subjects of Austria:— “ Agite igitur" (says Leopold, 29th August, 1690) "pro Deo, pro religione, pro salute, pro libertate, pro securitate vestra restauranda, intrepide ad partes nostras accedite, Lares vestros culturamque agrorum non deserite, socios vestros ad sequenda vestigia vestra invitate."

Then accordingly took place the immigration of Servians into Hungary, the first of which consisting of 36,000 souls, was under the guidance of their archbishop, Arsenius, and in the spring of the following year was held the congress of Temesvar, in which the future position of the nation was fully discussed under the presidency of Count Francis Balassa. They were willing to become subjects of the emperor and the house of Austria, but the recognition of their religion and nationality was an undisputed postulate, and the congress broke up with a warm feeling of gratitude to the house of Austria, but not a single trace of

an engagement on the part of the Servians to accept the supremacy of the Magyar nationality.

In consequence of this congress the aulic chancery issued that diploma of the 20th of August, 1691, which secures to the Servians their national position, and which forms their fundamental institute. This was granted by the conqueror of Hungary from the Turks with a sword in one hand and a pen in the other; that is to say by the military chief of the agglomeration of states, now called the Austrian empire, and then denominated the German empire:-Leopoldus Dei gratiâ, Romanorum imperator, semper Augustus, ac Germania, Hungariæ, Bohemia, rex, &c."

From 1718 the Banat has been permanently free from Turkish rule. Unfortunately, however, one thing marred most materially the repose of the Servians, and that was the constant efforts of the Jesuits to unite those communicants of the Eastern Church with Rome. Thus, no sooner free from the temporal power of the Sultan, the Servians began to feel the ecclesiastical power of the Pope, for the Vatican has been all along tolerant on the subject of the subordinate discipline of the Eastern Churches provided her supremacy be acknowledged along with the cardinal points of her creed. The Servians were increasing and multiplying; the small band of 36,000 emigrants became a considerable nation. They followed the blackyellow banner from Belgrade to Antwerp, and from Strasburg to the frontiers of Moldavia. The armies of Louis Quinze had seen Trenk's pandours; and Voltaire thought to compliment his friend Frederick at their expense during his Silesian campaign. But the Greek religion met with every opposition at home. Sometimes the Catholics would hew down the crosses put up by the Servian Greeks on the roads, and at other times Greek bishops who had accepted catholic unity were in fear for their lives. One Bishop of Arad dared not enter one of his villages from fear of being mobbed.

But with the reign of Joseph, Jesuitism fell into disgrace; and at length, in the year 1791, the great act of Greek Emancipation took place, and from that date the religion and nationality of the Servians in the Austrian Empire took an entirely new development. Carlovitz, the seat of the Greek seminary, founded in 1733, became through charitable bequests and the piety and energy of Archbishop Stratimirovics, a college of the most important character with reference to the culture of the nation, and its general literature, although it is only justice to Ragusa to say that the new literature of Servia has produced no author that comes within even an approximate distance of Gondola, the great Ragusan epic poet of the seventeenth century.

The Servian revolution now procured for this race a vigorous national development, and it was in the Illyrian schools of Carlovitz, Temesvar, and Neusatz, that the most efficient employés of the new principality of Servia were educated, and from which the new Lyceum of Belgrade, now on the high road to become a university, received its professors. But while, on the south of the Save and Danube, the language and literature went forward in the most cheering manner, on the north of those rivers it only seemed to go backward-I say seemed, for, in reality, the means taken to crush the Servian nationality have produced a reaction that has had quite the opposite effect. Having got quit of Austrian Jesuitism, another plague visited this fertile Danubian Egypt, the ultraMagyarism, although Slavonia, is almost utterly devoid of Magyar population; and as for the Banat of Temesvar, the three counties of which are in the ultra-Magyar ethnographical maps boldly coloured as Magyar, the reader may judge for himself when I tell him that the metropolitan county of Temes has only two Magyar villages! But, as the last feather breaks the back of the camel, it was at the Magyar commissioner taking the Servian registers out of the church of Gross Kikinda, in the next