towering Alp and fertile plain, which one sees in the north of Italy. Here is grown the Menes wine, next to Tokay, the most celebrated of the Bacchanalian products of Hungary; dark, strong, and sweet, almost to lusciousness, it recals Malaga to recollection, and the dry Menes has something of the flagrant flavour and strong body of port wine.

The peasantry of this part of Hungary are uncommonly neat in their dress; and when one sometimes, at a pastoral ballet at the opera, sees peasants with garlands round their hats, and parti-coloured stockings and ribbons, and feels disposed in the midst of their entrechats to ask in what part of Europe such Colins and Fanchettes are to be found, one might answer in the county of Arad, so well are they dressed, and so tastefully do they dispose of real and artificial flowers round their broad-brimmed black hats. As we advance up the Maros we perceive that the men are taller and more robust than the ordinary Daco-Romans of the Banat; and the women, with classical features, and fine pale complexions, which come out of the shadow of a doorway, like the female portraits of Giorgione. Plunging into the mountains, where the valley of the Maros preserves a breadth of a mile, or a little more, I found myself among the Mots-Daco-Romans, or men of the mountains (Montes), which intervene between the Szeklers of the Upper Maros and the Magyars, dotted on the great plain between Szegedin and Grosswardeina much more resolute and determined set of shepherds, vine-dressers, and wood-cutters, than the timid ploughmen of the Banat.

CHAPTER XI.

THE VALE OF THE MAROS-ENTRANCE OF TRANSYLVANIAZAM-THE DACO-ROMANS-BROOS-THE SAXONS-THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF TRANSYLVANIA.

Next morning, after a couple of hours' drive, passing a little brook that bubbled its way to the Maros, I found myself in Transylvania; and never, in many a league of sea and land travel, did I enter a new country that presented a scene more beautiful and more melancholy. Zam was the name of the threshold of the land, and Zam will not be soon erased from my memory. Let the reader imagine the vale of the Maros, no longer in a narrow valley between mountains, but expanding into a wide amphitheatre; jagged pinnacles and wood-crowned precipices over all the heights round and round-stretches of park and pasture, slope gently down the rich, flat verdant meadow-land, and an English garden, or park, enclosed with a low stone wall, with turf and tufts of plantations, surrounds a country gentleman's large mansion, which, on a slight eminence, forms the prominent and central part of the picture; while behind it was a pretty hamlet, all new and neat, evidently the care of the lord of the manor. Here was the farm-yard, and the fancy cottage; there was the snug road-side inn, and the post-house, but all ruined, roofless, and tenantless; not a soul to be seen at a place, that a year ago had been the delight of the beholder, and the abode not only of rural comfort, but of taste and luxury, as the Mosaic pavement of the hall showed. Not a soul was to be seen; not a cock crowed; not a cow lowed; and the distant tinkle of the goat-bell on a cliff was the only sound that broke the terrible silence of the desolate scene. This was the dwelling and village of a Wallachian country gentleman, a loyalist, named Nobcsa, whose house had been attacked and plundered by the Szeklers, and the destruction consummated by his own fellow countrymen. Let no one suppose that

this was a solitary case, or that these excesses were confined to one party. The war in Transylvania was a war of the cottage against the castle, and of race against race, in which politics, either liberal or conservative, had little to do. Let not the reader suppose that Zam was a rare instance of destruction. From my entrance into Transylvania, until my arrival at Herrmanstadt, a three days' journey, every isolated house, small hamlet, or road-side inn, was destroyed; and, in a Daco-Roman country, I might literally apply the words of Châteaubriand, in speaking of the journey of his life, and denominate this road, “Une longue voie Romaine bordée de monumens funèbres,” so frequently was my attention called to the roofless houses, or the covered pit of human bodies.

The moral of all this may be stated in a very few words. The great majority of the inhabitants of Transylvania are Daco-Romans, who have lived for centuries in the most abject helotry, as may be judged of by a short list which I give of the disabilities under which the Daco-Romans lived up to the time of the Emperor Joseph. These laws were made in 1540; and however Joseph II. may be hated by the ultra-Magyars, one is constantly stumbling on some proof of his humane intentions.

No Daco-Roman was allowed to hold an office.

No school could exist without the permission of the landed proprietor.

No Daco-Roman could wear boots or shoes, only

sandals.

No Daco-Roman could wear embroidered or fur dresses, only rough woollen.

No Daco-Roman was allowed to wear a hat, only a fur cap.

No Daco-Roman's window in the town was allowed to look on the street, only on the court-yard of each house. No Daco-Roman was allowed to have a chimney.

In short the Magyars, with all their love of liberty for themselves, are very fond of domination for others; and the Daco-Roman,-in spite of the numbers of his race

in Transylvania, the natural acuteness of his intellect, and his muscular, well-proportioned frame,-is deficient in the self-respect and energy of a free man. But it was the unwise interference of the ultra-Magyar party, with the national pride and municipal institutions of a very different race-the Saxons of Transylvania-that was the immediate cause of the sanguinary insurrection of the cottage against castle.

It was at Szasvaros or Broos that I first arrived in the territory of this race, whose manners, customs, civilisation, and education are essentially distinct from those of either Magyar or Daco-Roman, and this portion of Transylvania is called the Saxon Land. Szasvaros, a Hungarian word, is literally translated Saxon-town, inhabited two-thirds by Saxons, and one-third by Magyars; but the place has rather the German than the Magyar type, and reminds one of those old-fashioned country towns in Bavaria or on the Rhine, the houses plastered and painted in various colours, and presenting a green or a crimson gable to the street. They come, as I have already stated, from the Lower Rhine, although called Saxons, and speak a funny dialect, that reminds one of Dutch or broad Scotch, and is quite incomprehensible to the people of Vienna, but, to this day, is well understood by the people of Dusseldorf and Nymwegen. Most of the Saxons wear woolly caps, and on the high road are seldom seen on foot, but mounted on the lively little horses of Transylvania. The women are not remarkable for their good looks, and have a peculiar method of wearing the hair, the tresses being plaited into one tail collected at the forehead, and hanging down the right cheek. Siebenbürgen, or the Seven Boroughs, is the German name of Transylvania, and this Szasvaros, the German name of which is Broos, is one of them; the order in which they were settled in Transylvania being as follows:-Mediasch, 1142; Muhlenbach, 1150; Herrmanstadt, the capital, 1160; Clausenburg, 1178; Schässburg, 1178; Reussmarkt, 1198; Broos, 1200. To these seven

were subsequently added two others, Bistritz, 1206; and Kronstadt, 1208.

Their towns have quite a middle-age look, with towers and old walls, like the back-grounds of Callot; and at Muhlenbach, the next town to Broos, the inn was behind the spirit of the age, and all around my bed-room, instead of the fashionable portraits of Rodolph, Fleur de Marie, and the Maître d'Ecole, were the adventures and misadventures of the prodigal son, with a long homily in print at the foot of each. Forethought, order, economy, patience, and indefatigable perseverance, mingled with considerable egotism, obstinacy, and an indisposition towards innovation, is the character of this people; and in these qualities we see those elements of the extension of the Teutonic race, westwards, until Celt is merged in Frank and Saxon; eastwards, far beyond the original limits of the Slaavic races; and southwards, comprising the military domination of the fairest part of Italy. Brilliant and sympathetic as the Latin and Celtic races are, acute as is the perception of the Slaav, slow and phlegmatic as these German races are, they command a homage (however unwillingly it may be rendered) to the superiority of the results they have achieved; and it is certainly the operation of a great law, and not the mere accident of war, that has for centuries subjugated a nation of men of genius to a race that they detest, and has placed German families on the thrones of the four greatest monarchies of Europe.

The character of the Daco-Roman is, as I have shown, the reverse of all this; he was in fact a savage in a state of subjugation, and no preparatory scheme of national education paved the way for his being safely entrusted with any franchise. The bond of society among those semi-barbarians was fear, and fear alone; nothing, therefore, could be expected from the dissolution of this bond but the orgie of a drunken helot. When, therefore, the mis-called "abolition of feudalism" relieved him of a considerable portion of the rent of his land; instead of