matter the outdoor laborers in the city itself, enable one to understand the' old.

After a few days the Exhibition tired me, for mountains of packing-cases were arriving every day from the railway stations, where they had been blocked for months. After the exhibition there is little to fall back upon but the Opera, the concerts, and the theatre. The picture galleries seemed to me comparatively uninteresting; and after spending a few evenings in admiring the perfect training of orchestra and chorus, the beauty of the scenic effects, and the general level excellence of the acting at the Opera, I made the excursion which most visitors to Vienna will be tempted to make this season, and ran down the Danube to Pesth. Shakespeare, by the way, is in great favor in Vienna. I saw" Romeo and Juliet" admirably performed by a better general company, and one which showed a truer appreciation of this author, than I remembered to have seen at home; and Nikolai's version of the " Merry Wives of Windsor" was performed one evening at the Opera. Frau Fluth and Frau Reich -Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page-were admirable; and Sir John was, out of sight, the best Sir John I have happened to come across. No doubt he is the difficulty of the opera, and the farcicalness of the part needs to be exaggerated a little to adapt it to the altered conditions. But the brisk and sparkling dialogue of the "Merry Wives," and the love passages of Master Fenton, suit opera admirably; and the ballet of the fairies who pinch the fat knight in the wood, makes a magnificent spectacular close.

The way to Pesth and back recommended by the guide-books and sanctioned by common sense, is to go down the Danube in the steamer, which takes thirteen hours, and come back by train, which takes seven. The current, which runs nearly five miles an hour at Vienna, and three miles an hour at Pesth, makes up-stream sailing slow and weary work, and the voyage takes twice as long as the voyage down. It is something even to have seen the great river of Central Europe. I had stood before on the naked tableland in the Black Forest, between Furtwangen and Donauschwingen, from which the waters divide, flowing westward to the Rhine and the German Ocean, and eastward to the Black Sea. Years ago I had seen the Danube rush, fierce, deep, and narrow, past the quaint old towers and

the quainter old cathedral of Ulm. On the road to Vienna I had caught casual glimpses of it in the distance, and the city itself is on a branch of the river. But it is only the Regulirte Donau, a bit of the Danube turned into a Vienna canal. We embarked on the Regulated Danube at half-past six, and half-an-hour later were transferred to the bigger boat that was to take us all the way. It was a miserable morning of low grey clouds and sullen streaming rain, without promise or hope. For hours and hours there was nothing to interest but the swift-rushing river beneath, tearing onward like a mill-race to the sea. The "schöne blaue Donau" between Vienna and Pesth is a turbid, clay-colored torrent, that bends and swirls away through interminable flat plains, fringed by osier beds, and apparently empty of population. Every now and then it breaks up into two or three channels, and encloses some long flat island like Lobau, where Napoleon and 180,000 of the best soldiers in Europe were imprisoned for six weeks, after the checks of Aspern and Essling, only to burst out on their Austrian keepers the night before the decisive victory of Wagram. A few wretched villages-one that was "taken by Attila"-a stray farm or two in the far distance, a cart drawn by four oxen, a colony of water-mills, alone interrupt the monotony. These Danube water mills are odd-looking institutions. In those great plains wind is an unreliable " power," which lies idle for weeks or months, and when it comes often comes in hurricanes. Except the Danube and its tributaries there is little water, and the farmers drive their grain from long distances across the roadless plains to these primitive grinding shops. Two broad flat-bottomed boats are moored together, and on the one nearest the stream a house is constructed for the miller. As the current is strongest near the middle of the river, he anchors his house, and his mill, which is built on the second boat, as near the centre as he can, to be out of the highway of the steamers and other craft. His mill is simple. A trunk of a tree seems to be the axle, and transverse boards, containing the spokes of the water-wheel, splash round and receive in succession the blows of the current. Half-a-dozen, or sometimes a dozen of these curiosities may be moored one behind the other, a little village of amphibious animals.

The river sweeps through a gap of some

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, til 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. tainly, 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

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 fortress. For the most part a great Festung is as ugly as a huge ironclad. It is not the old rugged hill crowned with a grey castle frowning on the country below it, that strikes terror into the heart of an invader-it is the bit of open country sown with forts, within the lines of which an army may shelter, and which is all but indistinguishable from the monotonous land

Cer

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 glory 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. There are 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 tül 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 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.

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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.

"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