thing like highlands, past the morass or marsh, and into Hungary. But for long it is the same monotonous story-the great river rushing seaward through osier beds and wide fields of cattle country-the watermills, with their appended millers' houses, dropping lazily in the stream-the grey clouds slowly rising and the rain gradually softening into a dismal drizzle, and hardly anything but the boat in which we were visible in the dead-alive landscape. Our boat itself is only half-interesting. Its steerage is filled with a motley crew of country people, of unknown nationalities, talking languages equally unknown. Apparently there are a few Turks, and a considerable number of Danubian principality people, but the bulk of the passengers, to guess from the frogged and braided coats and jack boots, was Hungarian. The cabin has sleeping-births for some forty people below, and a deck-house is built above them, on the top of which is our fine-weather promenade, while inside it some kind of meal, some coffee, or a little bottle of wine, or a second breakfast, is always going on. In the corner three black and dirty-looking Danubian commercial travellers are playing "beggar my neighbor" with ferocious rapidity and under great excitement. They were at it without moving for three hours at least, and one could not help admiring the resources of the human mind which has discovered and can enjoy such a refuge from ennui. About o'clock we reached Komorn, the great fortress of Hungary, from which it defied the Austrians in 1848, and which is now, it is supposed, one of the strongest in the world. It lies where the Waag, one of her largest tributaries, joins the Danube. There is a little, flat, dreary town, with a desolate steeple or two. The inhabitants are, it seems, chiefly Calvinists. There are few signs of life, but the plain on both sides of both rivers is broken here and there by innumerable low mounds, with ditches before them, which give the low, sullen, wicked look of a modern fort scape. It is thus that the fortifications of Verona keep watch on the Adige, where it bends away from the Alpine valley into the broad plains of Lombardy; and Komorn sits silent and almost unnoticed at the confluence of the Danube and the Waag. One might have scarcely observed the fortifications, but for the trumpeter who came out of the last of them as we swept past it, as suddenly as the little man who emerges from a Black Forest clock, and who blew a gay little blast, most likely to gather the scattered warriors to their mid-day meal. We took it kindly. Perhaps he was inviting us, as the fortress is supposed to do, with a "kommen Morgen" -come here to-morrow-for there is no use trying to get in to-day. As the day wore on the clouds drew back and the sun began to show. Our imprisoned fellow-passengers came crawling out to the upper deck, like so many flies awakened from their winter slumbers by the genial warmth. The river grew more interesting. Hills began to appear far to the right, and farms and villages could occasionally be seen. The hills crept closer and closer to the river, till at a turning the cathedral and ruined fortress of Gran burst upon us. The curtain of the hills of the Bakonyer Wald sweeps down to the river, and our passage seems barred by the cathedral, which stands on a lofty mound jutting into the river. The Hungarians think it the fac-simile of St. Peter's at Rome. It has a cupola like St. Peter's, and pillars with a frieze and statues above it, as in that famous model. But what the Hungarian St. Peter's lacks in size and perhaps in dignity, it makes up in the picturesqueness of its situation, for it would be difficult anywhere to find a nobler site. Certainly, the cathedral of the old ecclesiastical city which was made a bishopric by King Stephen in 1001, is as much superior to the mites of squalid little village churches which blinked at us from time to time from the banks of the Danube, as St. Peter's is to the great churches of the Italian towns. There is something indeed Italian about the whole scene. A splendid sweep of vine and wood-clad hills to right and left lies under the sullen and threatening light of a thunder-laden afternoon; side valleys cut down through it to the plain which fringes the river brink in torrents of foliage; when the eye catches the naked rock between the vine-rows, it looks blood-red as everything in Italy looks to one fresh from the sober color of the Alps. As we sweep past the sacred city of Hungary, the river narrows-the hills gather upon either side, and the Danube runs for an hour or two in a gorge like that which holds the Rhine between Andernach and Bingen. From Gran to Wissegrand, the "high fortress" where the kings of Hungary lived in the eleventh century, and on to Wartzen, where the river, which has been struggling eastward, suddenly gives it up and tumbles away from the hills straight to the south,-the Danube is finer, to my thinking, than the Rhine. The vines do not look so much like potato rows; the enclosing hills are higher, and the great river itself fills you with the sense of its majesty and power. There are fewer noble castles to solicit one's jaded attention; but the thought how far and how fast we are running through unfamiliar countries and peoples to the very gates of the mysterious East, haunts one with a quickening charm. The evening was closing in as the steamer carried us to Buda-Pesth, or Pesth-Ofen —to discover, to one's astonishment, that the lines of palaces on the boulevards at Vienna were repeating themselves along the river front of the capital of Hungary. But it is late, and the long day's sail has surely earned a night's repose. The city of Pesth is singularly well situated. Those who know Edinburgh can easily realize it. The Princes Street valley, through which the railway runs, must be doubled in breadth and filled up with the Danube, and the Calton Hill must be taken bodily across it and placed on the same side as the Castle. When that has been done, and the whole Princes Street side smoothed down into a great flat plain of houses running out to miniature fields and open country, we have a model of Pesth-Ofen. Ofen is the doublehilled town across the Danube, with the Emperor's palace where the Castle stands -the rock sweeping down less steeply to the river, and falling in terrace gardens, bright with laurels and laburnums and flowering currants. In place of the Calton Hill stands the fortress of the Blocksberg, which could at any moment lay the open city of Pesth in ruins. The town of Ofen is a mass of tortuous and half-paved lanes struggling upwards from the river between and towards these two summits. It is picturesque enough from the other side, but close at hand it is poor and mean, a sort of Irish village multiplied fifty-fold in population. On the river there are some handsome houses, above there are but peasants' cottages and little beershops, and a church or two. The giory of Buda Pesth is modern. Eighty years since the University was brought in from Tyrnau, and many of the public buildings still remind one of the old days when the town was insignificant. The fine buildings are all new, and away from the river esplanade they are not numerous. There is a huge cathedral begun, and left quarter finished. There is a great Jewish synagogue in a sort of Moorish architecture, which is the largest and most remarkable ecclesiastical building of the place. It is with a strange sensation that one reads signboards in three languages-German, Magyar, and Hebrew-to inform the passer-by that he may have beer and wine. There are many Jews here, and there must be many who know nothing but Hebrew, or these Hebrew signboards could hardly be so common. The theatres, the postoffice, the municipal buildings, are poor and mean. There is a little oddity of a Greek church, with a huge painted screen, stretching from floor to ceiling, completely separating choir from nave. Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, and a cloister and a monastery. I should have thought there was little poverty in the place, had I not chanced to see one midday distribution of alms at the Franciscan cloister. A troop of old men and women were swarming in and out at the side gateway of the Franciscan church. They went through a long cloister till they came to a room beside the kitchen of the monastery, in which a comfortablelooking monk, of about forty, was smoking a long pipe and superintending the distribution of meat soup. It was dreadful to see how greedily some half-dozen of the poor old creatures, who were nuzzling together inside the door of the cloister, were devouring the soup and meat they had just received, plunging their fingers into the smoking mess, and worrying the solid bits as eagerly as a starving dog worries a bone. Outside there was little sign of poverty. Everybody seemed busy and industrious. There is far less of outward charity than in Vienna; indeed, there is a certain king-of-my-castle air, but There are there seems much more work about the shopkeepers, and everybody one meets with is at first hardly agreeable. There are innumerable book-shops. The literature is cosmopolitan-French, English, German, and Magyar, but it is plain that German is a foreign language, like French or English. The official proclamations and the street bills are mostly in both languages, but one never finds them in German only, and often only in Hungarian. To my surprise, the people are anything but handsome. Most of the grown men are short and square-built and strong-looking, but there is a greater mass of stunted and unhealthy-looking lads with blotchy faces and bad blood, than I have seen, I think, in any other capital in Europe. It is out in the country perhaps that one sees the true Hungarian; and when we did go out, we seemed to lose the unlovely-looking clerks and commis-voyageurs who crowded us in Pesth itself. But even about them there was an unmistakeable look of the East; and it is clear that with Vienna we have left behind us many habits of Western Europe. Pesth is still full of memories of 1849. In the open square beside the palace there is a monument to General Hentzl, who, "with Colonel Allmoth and 418 braves, died here a death of sacrifice for Emperor and Fatherland." The Hungarians swarmed across the river up the hill from Pesth, and poor Hentzl did what he could to keep them from the heights on which the citadel was then planted. But the ruin of that time, and the resolution since Sadowa to treat Pesth as almost an equal capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empires and Kingdom, have given it the material impulse of which it shows so many signs. We went out one day to the races, when they were honored by the presence of the Prince of Wales and Prince Arthur. The Rakos course lies some five miles or so from the centre of the city, on a broad oasis-bordered flat. Horses, riders, and trainers were many of them English. There was the grand stand, the saddling place, and the ring, but they were different from the English institutions of the same names. There is no betting in one sense, but there is a sort of public sweepstakes in which everybody puts down so much on the horse he thinks likely to win. If he chooses an outsider, the chances are that there will be few with whom he will have to divide his winnings; if he chooses a "hot" favorite, he cannot expect much more than his stake to be returned. The races were much like other races, except one for farmers' horses. It was ridden by Hungarian farmers without saddles, and in their national costume. A huge nightshirt flows down to the feet, and is sewed up to make a loose pair of trousers. A sleeveless waistcoat is stuck on, and the long white arms of the shirt fly loose, a foot or so broad, at the wrist. The head is covered with something like a tea-cosy, or a smoking-cap, with a feather stuck in it, and the dress is complete. The horses were light-looking, but active and businesslike, and the riders rode as keenly as if the race was for life. Two of them could not get their restive animals off till the others had ran nearly half the course, but they insisted on running it out as faithfully as if they had a ghost of a chance of winning. Over every incident of the race the excitement of the crowd was as great as it could have been at home, and the "road out" was as dusty and as full of perilous chances to carriage or rider. But there was no such carnival of "gaminism," either here or at Vienna, as on an English racecourse. There were no Aunt Sallys or Cheap Jacks, or men with nimble peas or shows, or Chinese jugglers. Everything was decorous and business-like, till the common eagerness over the race made the whole world kin. I was called home hurriedly, and the vivid contrast between Pesth and London was the most startling of my experiences of Eastern travel.— Macmillan's Magazine. MANZONI. "EI FU." Such are the opening words of that great effort of Manzoni's genius, the Ode on the Death of Napoleon, and they are now applicable to the Poet him self. He was, he no longer is, the author of the greatest work of fiction in the Italian language, the poet whose best energies were employed in the praises of reli gion, the champion of truth and justice, the defender of the Christian faith against the attacks of infidelity; for on Thursday, May 22, 1873, at the great age of eightynine, Manzoni went to his rest. "The city wears mourning" (La città è in lutto"), was proclaimed in word and deed at Milan, and so it should be. Nevertheless the lamentations, which the loss of one at the same time so virtuous and so eminent would naturally occasion, are checked by the consideration that a life of singular honor and distinction, prolonged far beyond the usual term of existence, with full possession of all the faculties, has been brought to a peaceful close at his native place, and surrounded, if ever man was, by all "that should accompany old age," as honor, love, obedience, troops of friends." The slight sketch which follows is intended to induce the general reader to pursue the study of Manzoni's life and character in his works, and, in however humble a degree, to contribute to their estimation. Alessandro Manzoni was born at Milan in 1784. His father, whom he had the misfortune to lose in early youth, was Count Manzoni, his mother the daughter of Beccaria, the author of a treatise on "Crimes and Punishments," once much, and not undeservedly esteemed. She inherited, and further transmitted to her son, a portion of the sound wisdom and generous principles which animate that work. It was not unbecoming the grandson of Beccaria to record, as it will be seen he did later, his horror of torture, and to expose the wickedness and uselessness of it as a judicial mode of discovering the truth. Manzoni's ambition was early fired by the example of the three great contemporaries who immediately preceded him in the difficult path of letters-Vittorio Alfieri, Vincenzo Monti, and Ugo Foscolo. He was barely twenty-one when, by an epistle in blank verse, he proved himself not unworthy of being admitted into that fellow ship. In these verses he imagines that the spirit of his friend appears to him after death, and, in reply to the question as to whether he was not reluctant to tear himself from this world, he puts into Imbonati's mouth a fearless and spirited condemnation of those vices which had already filled with disgust the youthful mind of Manzoni. In them we see the first germ of those feelings by which his life was influenced-the love of truth and justice, and the abhorrence of oppression and wrong-which appear in all his works, and which, first professed at twenty-one, he maintained unchanged through a life prolonged to its ninetieth year. These verses, while by no means destitute of individual merit, are so remarkable on this account that a translation of some of them is here given : "Hadst thou my death Foreknown-for that foreknowledge and for thee Whose crime is unsuccessful-where the crime In 1805 he accompanied his mother to Paris, where, by his relationship to Beccaria, whose book had been commented on by Voltaire and Diderot, he attracted the notice of Volney, Cabanis, De Tracy, and Fauriel. His intercourse with these men who represented the Atheist school of thought of the eighteenth century, was attended by an exactly opposite result to that which might have been expected. It produced a strong reaction upon his generous mind, and first incited him to become the champion of the truths which they attacked. It reflects no small credit upon the natural rectitude of his principles that he should have found safety in what might have proved a dangerous snare. with an immediate reward, for the light of the Christian faith, which he had been able to descry amid the dark mists spread over it by her enemies, dawned full upon his mind, revealing to him the truth of those mysteries which the philosophers, in their pride of intellect, could not discern, and enabled him to utter them anew in hymns far superior in originality of thought and beauty of expression to any others which had hitherto been written. The chief of these are upon the vital truths of Christianity: The Nativity (II Natale), the Passion (La Passione), the Resurrec He met tion (La Risurrezione) of our Lord, and the Descent of the Holy Ghost (La Pentecoste), which last is considered by his countrymen to surpass them all. More especially the invocation of the Holy Spirit in the four concluding stanzas, the Giver of that Peace "which no terrors can disturb, no infidelity shake, which the world may deride but can neither give nor take away," words almost of inspiration, which drew from Goethe the admission "that an argument often repeated, and a language . almost exhausted by the use of many centuries, may regain their first youth and freshness when a young and vigorous mind enters upon the subject and adopts the worn-out language." In 1809 Manzoni published a poem entitled "Urania;" but it was not till 1821 that he became a poet of European fame, when he wrote upon a subject of European interest-the death of Napoleon Buonaparte. The opening words of the "Cinque Maggio" have already been alluded to, in which Manzoni announces to the world the death of this extraordinary man; and, after dwelling for an instant upon the appalling effect which such an announcement must produce, unrolls in the brief space of a few stanzas the whole panorama of that marvellous life before our eyes; the passage of the Alps, the Pyramids of Egypt, the plains of Madrid, the rushing Rhine, the snowy steppes of Moscow, the Empire which stretched from the one to the other sea ("dall uno all altro mar"); the alternations of success and failure which attended his career, the glory the greater because dearly bought, the laurel of the victor, the flight of the vanquished, an Emperor's throne, or an exile's banishment, twice at the summit of all human greatness, twice levelled with the dust ("Due volte nella polvere," "due volte sugli altar"). Nor are the feelings of his own breast, as varied, as agitated as the actions of his life, less eloquently described -the fluttering hopes and fears which wait on a great enterprise; the burnings of his ambitious heart lest he should fail to grasp the prize which it was madness to hope for; the blank despair when, in lonely exile, the whole flood of memory *"ai terrori immobile E alle lusinghe infide, Ma che rapir non può."-La Pentecoste. NEW SERIES.-VOL. XVIII., No. 3 swept in upon his soul. Once again he sees the breezy battlefield, the fluttering canvas of the tents, the lightning-flash of the infantry, the rapid rush of the cavalry, and above the distant roar of the cannon the short stern word of command, obeyed as soon as heard. No wonder if the poet should have thought the religious consolation which he himself so dearly prized, the only balm for the bitter disappointment attendant on the train of such recollections as these, and that he should conclude his ode with the assertion that Napoleon's indomitable will bowed in submission to the behests of that branch of the Catholic Church to which nominally at least he belonged. Such is the imperfect sketch of one of the finest pieces of Italian lyric poetry, the greatest tribute which could be paid to a great genius, while it invested him with a halo of romance so brilliant as to dazzle the eye which would search for his faults. The fame which this ode acquired more than justified Manzoni's modest hope that "perhaps his lay would not die." It was translated into German by Goethe, and with care and spirit into English both by the late Lord Derby and Mr. Gladstone. The fertility of Manzoni's genius was next displayed in two tragedies, 'Il Conte di Carmagnola" (the story of the celebrated Venetian "condottiero" of the fourteenth century), and the "Adelchi," the subject being the expedition of Charle magne against Adelchi, the last of the Longobardian Chiefs (772-774). These tragedies attracted great notice in the literary world. Both were carefully commented upon by Goethe* and received from him the highest praise. The "Conte di Carmagnola" he makes the subject of a careful analysis, and in conclusion he compliments Manzoni upon having shaken off the old trammels and struck out for himself a new path in which he walks so securely as to make it safe for others to follow his footsteps. He praises him for his polished, careful details, the simplicity, the vigor, and the clearness of his style, and adds that, after a most careful examination, he could not wish a word altered. Nor was this all. Goethe wrote again |