impos-sible to compare the state of Hungary with that of the countries on the other side the Danube, and not rejoice that Lorraine and Eugene drove the turbaned tyrant from this, his strongest hold in Europe.
For one hundred and forty-five years did the Turks remain masters of Buda: yet almost the only evidences of their former dominion are some baths near the Danube, and the tomb of a saint; the former of which are still used by the Christians, and the latter is sometimes visited by a pious Moslem pilgrim. The Turkish baths, which are supplied by natural sulphur-springs, are small vaulted rooms, with steps leading down to the bottom, along which the bathers lie at different depths. If I might judge from my feelings merely, I should say that the steam which arises from these springs is much hotter than the water itself; for, though it was quite painful to support the heat of the steam, the water appeared only moderately warm.
It is not easy to imagine a more perfect contrast than is pre-sented by the environs of Pest and Buda; the one a bare sandy plain; the other hill and valley, beautifully varied with rock and wood. Hitherto this romantic neighbourhood has been sadly neglected; but as the taste for the picturesque is extended, and the wealthy citizens of Pest begin to desire the imaginary impor-tance conferred by landed possessions, and the real luxury of country-houses, the hills of Buda will be as well covered with suburban villas and mimic castles as Richmond or Hampstead.
At present, the taste for the picturesque is, perhaps, as little felt in Hungary as in almost any country in Europe. The negligence with which the position of a house is commonly chosen, the ab-sence of gardens and parks, or, if present, the bad taste with which they are laid out, and the carelessness with which they are kept, are strong evidence of this deficiency.
There are, however, some very striking exceptions; among which, Godolo, in the neighbourhood of Pest, stands pre-eminent.
In spite of the disadvantages of a sandy soil, and rather a flat
situation, it would be difficult in any part of England to find a flower-garden either more tastefully disposed, or more perfectly kept, than that of the Princess Grassalkovich. All the varieties of lawn, boscage, and bower—all the lesser elegancies of trellis, basket, and bouquet, have been taken advantage of in the best manner. Another beauty of Godolo is the Dairy. It is situ-ated in what was formerly a forest; and which, by judicious cut-ting out, now forms a very beautiful natural park, in appearance it is a pretty little villa, and we entered by an elegantly furnished parlour which leads into a circular saloon. On each side of this saloon open two folding-doors, which disclosed—what shall I say?—two vaccine drawing-rooms! for cow-houses I cannot call them. A wide walk runs through the centre of the rooms in the form of a cross, towards which looked about one hundred cows;
and, at the angles of the cross, four magnificent bulls. Nothing could be better behaved than this society; the very bulls had a sotto-voce bellow, quite different from that of vulgar bulls, by which they expressed their sovereign wishes to their matron dames. The cows are of Swiss breed; on one side of the dairy they are all red, on the other all spotted. Behind each cow was a diary of her age, food, milk, &c, &c. The Swiss cows are pre-ferred, I believe, rather for their beauty and rarity, than for any superiority in milking or feeding, to the native white or dun breed of Hungary; which, by a little care and attention, might probably be much improved. It is doubtful whether the intro-duction of new breeds, or the cultivation of those natural to the country, is the more advantageous.
But it is not, certes, at Godolo, amid the beauties which art and nature have alike thrown around the place, that such specu-lations intrude themselves; we were too much dazzled and de-lighted to be critical. It is impossible that any of our party should forget the delightful evening which we spent in that pretty park, with its noble trees, and wild deer, as they every now and then crossed our path,—the drive through the woods, and, least of all, the society of its amiable and accomplished mis-tress, which throws a charm over every thing within its sphere.
But, such matters tend little to your instruction, reader, however much they may have done to our pleasure; and, besides, they trench on that strict line of non-allusion to any but public cha-racters which I have drawn for myself. "Revenons a nos mou-tons."
The stillness of Buda contrasts very strongly with the active
VIEW FROM BLOCKSBERG. 155 bustle of Pest. Buda is the residence of the Bureaucracy of Hungary, and there is always about these gentry a certain se-dateness of air, and not unfrequently a pompous vacancy of ex-pression, which has nothing analogous to the haughty look of the rich noble, or the quick glance of the enterprising merchant of Pest; and Buda seems to have caught the complexion of its inhabitants. The royal palace, occupied by the Palatine, the residence of the commander of the garrison, and the houses of two or three great families, give an air of dignity, but not of life, to the town; and, as we walked round the ramparts, and admired its beautiful position, it was quite a relief that the establishment of a permanent bridge would soon restore to Buda* its share of life and prosperity, of which its young and lusty rival seemed in danger of robbing it entirely.
We now left the fortress ; and, passing some rows of ill-built bouses, ascended the Blocksberg, the pride and ornament of the landscape. The small building on the top is an observatory, where there is a good set of instruments, but we did not stop to see them. The view from the Blocksberg is magnificent. Buda, with its blue chain of mountains vanishing in the distance, Pest, with its yellow plain of sand, and the glorious Danube, with its green islands, were all at our feet, forming a picture so beauti-folly mixed up with buildings, boats, and moving figures, that we sat long to watch it ere we felt inclined to move. There was matter for much thought too in that view. One hundred and fifty years ago, Pest, now so beautiful and flourishing, was a mere heap of ruins; its mud walls broken down, its houses de-stroyed, and its few inhabitants flying from the desolation around them. At that time, too, a Turkish Pasha sat in the fortress of Buda, and nearly half of Hungary was subject to his sway. In one hundred and fifty years, then, has this place grown to its present size; from a miserable ruin, it has become one of the capitals of Europe! Nor does Pest owe its rise to the fiat of a monarch, who could raise a Potsdam or a Carlsruhe from the desert; but to the energy of the people and its own natural
ad-* The railroad from Vienna through Raab to Buda, not dreamed of at the time of oar visit, though now in active preparation, will do much to raise the importance of Buda still higher. Since 1836 no less than four or five lines of railroad, traversing Hungary in every direction, have been proposed, and some of them actually undertaken. The success of steam navigation has given a stimulus to enterprise and speculation in Hungary, from which the country will eventually reap a golden harvest.
vantages. Situated nearly in the centre of one of the richest countries in the world, on the banks of a river which traverses more than half of Europe, surrounded by a population requiring a supply of almost every article of luxury from abroad, chosen by fashion as the metropolis, with a good climate, and capable of un-limited extent on every side, it requires but little sagacity to fore-see a brilliant future for Buda-Pest. No one can wish its prospe-rity more sincerely than the author of these pages; for he believes that with it is closely associated the prosperity of all Hungary, and perhaps too the independence of the east of Europe.
EXCURSION TO F0KED. 1 5 7
CHAPTER X.
FURED AND THE BALATON.
Excursion to Ftired.—Inn at Mart on V&sar.—Houses under ground,—
Style of Travelling.—-Stuhlweissenburg.—Veszprim.—Minaret—Bi-shop.—Treading out the corn.—Fured—our reception—Theatre.—The Balaton.—Dinner party.—Soir6e.—Hungarian beauty.—Ball.—Waltz-ing.—H ;s Adventures at Tihany.—Supper at the Restaurant's—its Consequences.—Serenade.—Gipsy Band.—Four-in-hand Driving.—Ti-hany.—Monastery. — Fossils.—Tradition of the Peasants.—Second Ball.—The Polonaise.—The Hungarian Dance.—Return.
ABOUT eighty miles south of Pest, on the shores of the Bala-ton, there is a pretty little bathing-place called Fiired; which is worth the stranger's visiting, as well for the beauty of the neigh-bouring scenery, as for the pleasant and sociable society which commonly assembles there.
As the weather was fine, and nothing was going on of parti-cular interest at Pest, we determined to avail ourselves of it;
and, making our arrangements accordingly for a few days' ex-cursion, started for Fiired.
The road, as far as Stuhlweissenburg, which terminated our first day's journey, contains little of interest, except a good house and pretty park of Count Brunswick's at Marton Vis&r, where we stopped to dine. Marton Vasar is rather a favourable speci-men of a Hungarian village, and the inn bore marks of a thriving commerce; and, as a specimen of its class, I may as well describe it. Ijt is a long one-storied house, forming two sides of a court-yard, and, besides the kitchen and landlord's room, contains a large drinking-room for the peasants, and two strangers' rooms.
The latter have boarded floors, thickly strewn over with sand;
and are furnished each with two beds, a table, and three or four wooden chairs. In half an hour we had a dinner of soup, bouilli, vegetables cooked in grease, roast fowls, and pancakes; and such is the common fare and ordinary accommodations of the country inns of Hungary.
I was wrong in saying that there was nothing of interest save
VOL. i.—14
Count Brunswick's house; for, a little further on, we observed several villages built under ground, the loof being the only part of t^he houses visible. We examined some of these burrows, for such they literally are; and found them mere holes cut in the ground, roofed in with straw, and entered by a sloping path, fre-quently without any other opening than the doorway and chim-ney, and as filthy and miserable as can well be imagined. What may seem to render the fact more extraordinary is, that one of these villages, we were told, is inhabited entirely by noblemen;
that is, by men who possess a small portion of land, pay no taxes to Government, and are free from all seigneurial impositions. Let the reader keep this fact in mind; for it serves to show that it is not the amount of taxation which renders men poor and mise-rable, but the absence of a knowledge and desire of something better, and of the industry and thousand virtues to which that knowledge gives birth. It is but fair to say that I never saw such houses in any other part of Hungary; though I believe, during the Turkish war, a great part of the country was reduced to a similar state.
Stuhlweissenbnrg, though formerly a Roman town, and a name of frequent occurrence in Hungarian history, contains nothing remarkable. The palace of the bishop, and some of the buildings connected with it, are handsome; but the streets are badly paved, and the whole town disagreeably placed in the centre of a huge The next morning we passed through Palota, and while we were waiting for fresh horses walked round the ruins of the old castle, which a Count Zichy—one of the fifty-two Counts Zichy of Hungary—has had the good taste to repair and render habit-able.
At Veszprim, the seat of another bishop, we stayed long enough to visit the handsome episcopal palace, which crowns a steep hill that formerly bore one of the most important fortresses of Hungary. This was for a long time in the possession of the Turks; and contains a memorial of their residence, the more in-teresting from its rarity. One slender minaret, erected by the Turks above an old Gothic tower, still retains its elegant pro-portions. It now serves as a watch-tower against fire: where the Muezzim daily called the faithful Moslem to his spiritual da-ties, a watchman now warns his Christian brethren of danger to their worldly goods.
The town of Veszprim is chiefly supported by trade, but not
TREADING OUT THE CORN. 1 5 9
of a very high class. It contains few good houses, but has less appearance of absolute poverty about it than almost any town I know. A party of the better sort of country people, whom we fell in with in this neighbourhood, gave us but a bad character of the bishop and chapter of Veszprim as landlords. They com-plained sadly of their oppression, and said that the peasants of the church were worse off even than the peasants of the nobles, for the masters of the former had no permanent interest in their welfare, but tried to grasp as much as they could during the 6hort period of their enjoyment. A young girl of about eighteen years of age, one of the party, observed, rather caustically," Jich Gott! Hungarian priests are not worse than any other priests;
they are all tyrants when they hpve the power to be so." It is curious that, round the room of the village inn where this con-versation occurred, were hung the portraits of Lord John Russell, Stanley, Burdett, and Count Szechenyi.
As we pursued our journey, early as it was in the year, we had several opportunities of remarking the old custom of tread-ing out the corn by oxen or horses, so often antl so beautifully alluded to in sacred history. It is commonly performed in the open field where the corn is cut. A flat piece of ground is pre-pared, by paring and beating till it is quite hard, for the " thresh-ing-floor;99 the corn is then strewn over it; and a boy with a long whip stands in the centre, and drives the animals round the ring till the whole is sufficiently cleaned. It is still considered in Hungary the part of a miser " to muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn." I cannot explain the pleasurable feeling pro-duced by an actual illustration of this kind, simple as it is, of images which have been familiar to the mind from our earliest infancy, but of which we have never felt half the force or beauty till actually before our eyes.
It was near evening as we came in view of the Balaton; and, if not grand, its shores have sufficient hill and wood, as seen from this point, to give them all the character of pretty lake scenery. Fured is a bathing-place which has come into vogue only within the last few years; and, except for the huge Hor-vathischen Haus, and a few other less pretending buildings, it is yet as near a state of nature as the most romantic could desire.
The Horvathischen Haus is a large hotel, or rather lodging-house, which has been built by Mr. Horvath, the owner of the place; and, except the rooms reserved for his family, is let cut to vieiters at a very moderate rate.
We drove up directly to this hotel, and inquired if we could b* admitted; but a very positive " N o ! " was returned by tbe porter, with tbe pleasant addition, " that he did not think there was a single room to be had in the whole place." While a search was being made for rooms among the half-dozen houses which constitute Fured, all the idlers of the place began to col-lect round the carriage to stare at the Englishmen, whom our servant had not failed to announce the roofless strangers to be.
At the same time, a number of very bright eyes were observed peeping through the jalousies of the hotel, tantalizing us with the desire to stay, as every refusal of our applications for a rest-ing-place made us fear we must return. The crowd of gentle*
men grew every moment thicker; and as I have a particular dis-like to being stared at, I began to return as uncivil looks as pos-sible to wbat I thought the ill-mannered curiosity of these peo-ple. But I was soon undeceived, for it appeared that they were only at a loss in what language to address us; and, before long, one of them came up, and, speaking to us in French, very po-litely offered his services to aid us in our difficulties. The ice once broken, Hungarian frankness made us at home with tbe whole party in a few seconds. A lodging was soon found, tbe present occupants having been persuaded to change them in our favour. A little female curiosity was, I believe, after all, our best friend; for, as I afterwards heard, the Countess B de-clared that three Englishmen at a country bathing-place/and the first who had ever been there, were too great a catch to be lost so easily; she, therefore, insisted that rooms should be found;
and found they were accordingly.
While we were waiting till our quarters were prepared for us, we were subjected to the " question " as unmercifully as any poor victims of the inquisition ever were. A thousand odd que-ries as to our names, titles, country, and objects, did we reply to, and, I am proud to say, with great good humour too—
maugre our English breeding; for we saw that the inquirers had no other wish than to be polite and friendly, albeit the manner of it had somewhat startled us at first.
As our visiters disappeared, to scatter far and wide tbe news they had been so industriously collecting, we were left alone to discuss a late dinner, and laugh over the adventures of our arri-val, which offered so pleasant a prospect for the rest of our visit.
We were not doomed to rest long in quiet, however; for, almost before we could change our dusty dresses, it was time for the