wards the end of the year 1850, a feeble
ray of reason reappeared. Ennui is surely
a most intelligible affliction; and (promising
symptom of intelligence!) Dr. Görgen's
patient began to be bored. To amuse and
distract him, his guardians had recourse to
all sorts of childish games. Increasing
evidence of intelligence!—amusements
failed to amuse him. He even showed
himself able to appreciate the excessive
tediousness and stupidity of conversation
with his fellow-creatures. But he had
always been fond of chess; and chessmen
are, perhaps, the only men for whose conduct
a wise man should ever make himself
responsible. The count's reviving passion
for chess soon became all-absorbing. But
it was not easy to find him a partner
incapable of being tired out by his assiduity.
At last, however, this difficult desideratum
was secured.

A poor Hungarian student, whose name
was Asboth, was, at this time, finishing his
studies at the University of Vienna. In
the intervals of study, he gained a few
florins by teaching languages, and in this
way he earned, meagrely enough, the
means of paying for his own education.
Asboth was induced to pass all his
evenings at Döbling, playing chess with Dr.
Görgen's illustrious patient. The poor
student was paid so much an hour for this
chess-playing, which usually began at six
in the afternoon, and often lasted till
daybreak next morning. But one evening
Asboth failed to appear at the usual hour.
What was the matter? He had gone mad!
Shortly afterwards he died. When the count
heard of Asboth's death his grief was excessive,
and he sobbed like a child. From bondage
to the fantastic but terrible suffering of
his own mysterious affliction, Szechenyi was
released by the wholesome emotion of this
simple sorrow. Gradually he recovered—
not, indeed, the hopes, the aspirations, and
the energies which he had lost for ever in
the defeat of his country's independence,
but the full command of his fine intellect.

First his wife and children, then a host
of friends, were admitted to see him.
Their visits comforted his solitude, and
their converse revived his interest in public
affairs. One day the count's valet
informed him that a soldier, who had come
to see him, was anxious to be admitted.

"A soldier! What is his name?"

"Joseph, he says."

"I remember no soldier of that name. Yet
it may be some old servant whom I should
be ashamed to have forgotten. Admit him."

The door opened, and next moment the
young Archduke Joseph flung himself into
the arms of the count.

"Ah, how good, how kind of your
Imperial Highness."

"Bah! my dear count; for Heaven's
sake don't Imperial Highness, but tutoyer,
me, as you did in the good old time when
you used to dance me (troublesome brat
that I was!) upon your knees."

The poor count clung tenaciously to the
asylum he had found at Döbling, nor could
the frequent entreaties of his family ever
induce him to quit it. Yet from its window,
as it were, his intellect, supreme in its
superiority to those on whose conduct he
was henceforth to look down, an inactive
but keenly critical spectator, surveyed the
world outside, with a political coup d'Å“il
rarely equalled in accuracy of vision.

CHAPTER X.

THE political deluge of 1848 had subsided,
but the old landmarks did not reappear.
On the surface nothing was visible save
wreckage. Never before or since, in the
history of the Austro-Hungarian empire,
has there been a period so propitious to
the task of political reconstruction in a
conservative spirit as that which immediately
succeeded the revolution of 1848.
But this precious moment was lost in
the absence of any political intelligence
capable of understanding and utilising
it. All political parties were then
exhausted, all political quacks discredited;
society had learned by a bitter experience
to mistrust its own strength. It was willing
to be doctored and nursed and put on
the strictest regimen; but, above all things
else, it needed and longed for repose. It
had the misfortune, however, to have for its
doctors only Prince Schwartzenberg and
Baron Bach. These politicians (statesmen
we cannot call them) could think of no
more judicious treatment for their patient
than to put the poor wretch, first of all,
through a severe course of courts-martial,
then tie it up hand and foot in the tightest
ligatures of red tape, gag it, tweak its nose,
and spit in its face. This was called a
conservative policy.

Baron Bach was, or rather is (for, though
politically dead, he is yet, physically, alive)
a man of rare intellectual activity. But
his intellect is like that of Philip the Second
of Spain: the intellect of a born bureaucrat,
which looks at all that is great through a
diminishing glass, and all that is small through
a magnifying glass. Prince Schwartzen-