berg, though not a wise minister, was not
an ordinary man. His self-esteem and
self-confidence were enormous. He was a grand
seigneur by temperament as well as social
position: the head of a semi-royal house,
with more than imperial pride in all that
he was, and all that he represented.
Brilliant in conversation, energetic in action,
always effective in official correspondence,
he was vain, haughty, self-asserting,
overbearing, but gifted with a singular power
to charm and subdue, when he pleased, both
men and women. He was a passionate and
unscrupulous man of pleasure, whose love
of pleasure was, however, united with an
immense ambition, and a remarkable facility
for public affairs. He brooked no rival
either in affairs of state, or in affairs of
gallantry, and never scrupled to use his
political power to crush the objects of his
private dislike. He had an unmitigated
contempt for every variety of the human
species which did not find its culminating
representative perfection in himself. And
as the only portion of the human species
which Providence had reserved for this
honour was the purely German aristocracy
of Austria, the very existence of all the
other nationalities of the empire was, under
his régime, superciliously ignored. The
most eminent and wealthiest Hungarian
magnates—men whose properties are
amongst the largest in Europe, and who
had been taught by Szechenyi and his
disciples to study with affectionate assiduity
every inch of their native soil—now found
themselves subjected, in the minutest
details of local administration, to the clumsy
insolence of under-bred and ill-educated
official clerks, sent from Vienna to rule
over populations of whose language they
were ignorant, in provinces of which the
geography even was but imperfectly known
to them. The little finger of Schwartzenberg
was heavier than the whole body of
Metternich; and national susceptibilities
which had been tenderly managed by the
great prince, were insulted without
provocation by his successor. To the man who
now governed the empire it was intolerable
to admit that the empire was under
obligations to any one but himself. Those
who had defended, and those who had
attacked it, were treated alike, and the Croats
were crushed as flat as the Hungarians
under the hoofs of that high horse which
Prince Schwartzenberg rode rough-shod
over all.

Of the social condition of Hungary at
this time, the following picture is painted by
M. Aurelius Kecskemethy, a young
Hungarian, who, after having shared with
enthusiasm all the ultra-revolutionary
aspirations of the Hungarian youth in 1848, had
been so completely sobered by the result of
them, that in 1857 he was willing to earn
his livelihood as an employé of the
Austrian bureaucracy, whose worthy function
was (to use his own words) that of
"deciding how much intellectual nourishment
might, without inconvenience, be allowed
to the thirty-six millions of souls which
constitute the Austrian empire"—in other
words, the censorship of the press.

"In 1857," says M. Kecskemethy, "the
system of M. de Bach had attained its
apogee. 'Give us only ten years more,'
said the government, 'and all the elder
generation which still clings, in secret, to
the constitutional traditions of 1848, will
have died out.' No great trouble was
expected in dealing with the younger
generation. Some of us were driven, by sheer
want of any other means of earning our
bread, to seek employment of the government
which had reduced us to this necessity.
One went into the army, another
into a public office. No other career was
open to them. The small nobility was half
ruined. The great nobility was corrupted.
The youth of our national aristocracy,
carefully excluded from public life, gave
itself up to dissipation and frivolity. If a
few old men still pleaded in private for the
preservation of some of the ancient secular
liberties of the realm, their voice could
never reach the public ear, for the press
was completely silenced, and nothing but
the lowest and most venal journalism
allowed; whilst all that passed behind the
scenes was carefully concealed from every
eye by a vigilant police."

Such was the social and political condition
of the Austrian empire when the
intelligence of Szechenyi was re-awakened to
the contemplation of it.

Who can wonder that he deemed the
window of a lunatic asylum the most fitting
point of view from which to scrutinise the
effects of a policy extolled by the wiseacres
outside as the perfection of political
wisdom?

CHAPTER XI.

NEWS, accurate and ample, of the outside
world was not wanting to the recluse of
Döbling. Books, pamphlets, letters, visitors,
he received daily. His correspondence
was active and extensive, nor was it
altogether private. The fusion brought
about by government influence between the