estate without a house gives twelve days. But as the price of labour is high in Hungary, and in many districts it is impossible to procure a sufficient number of hands, with prudence they might be well off*. The different races enjoy very different degrees of prosperity. The Magyar peasant has plenty of bread and bacon, and even of beef to eat, plenty of wine to drink and tobacco to smoke. He is, however, from the carelessness of his nature, too apt to consume his stores before the harvest and vintage come round; the winter is passed in revelling, and when the labours of the field would require the physical forces to be sustained by nutritious fare, he is obliged to confine himself to a spare diet. Their houses are not large, but beautifully clean; if they do not live in more commodious ones, it is owing to their laziness, which prevents their building them, as they have time and materials at their command. The Slovacks, particularly the Ruthenes, seated for the most part in barren mountains, are not so well off. They are not perhaps more indolent than the Magyar, but they are less cleanly. As their families multiply much faster, the holdings are split into smaller subdivisions. Rather than descend, (i. e. for a permanency, for like the Irish, they leave their homes at the period of haymaking and harvest, and by these means often earn enough to support them the whole winter,) into the plains, where as hired labourers they could live on bread and meat, they prefer living on potatoes in their native mountains. To these people, curds form a great luxury, but slibowitza, a liqueur distilled from fruit, a still greater. The Wallachian is in perhaps even a more needy condition. Maize flour, in the shape of mammaliga (the Italian Polenta), and Málé, a sort of cake baked in the ashes, form his principal articles of food. His dwelling is a hut formed of wood or twigs, and wattled over, with a disproportionately large thatched roof; so that at a distance it looks like a stack standing in the middle of a maize field. The Germans, who are animated by the same industry and order as in the mother country, are most thriving. Some of their vilages in the Banat are pictures of prosperity. *In the county of Bihar the average wages paid for a day's labour are 40xr. W. W. (about 6 d.), which is sufficient remuneration where beef is 10xr. W.W. (about seven farthings) per lb. An intermediate link between the plebs and the populus, is formed by various privileged districts. Of these the most note-worthy are the Greater and Lesser Cumania, with Jasygia and the Haiduk towns: they are a sort of free peasants; with the peasants they pay taxes, with the nobles they give subsidies and are bound to the insurrection*: they are represented in the Lower House of Parliament, and have their own peculiar jurisdiction. The sixteen Zips towns approach nearer to the condition of the free boroughs. There are certain other districts and towns more or less favoured, but it would be tedious to particularize them. These privileged districts, though in themselves of no great extent or importance, deserve notice, as showing Magyar character and capabilities in a very favourable light; and what may be expected when all Hungary shall be in their condition. The Cumanians and Jazygians are celebrated for their bravery and honesty. In spite of the late untoward seasons, they are very prosperous; many of them own a thousand sheep. Mr. Paget thus speaks of his glance at Kardzag, the capital of Greater Cumania: "Our first post next morning, still over the sea-like snow-covered plain, brought us to Kardszag, a large and prosperous village of eleven thousand inhabitants. I call it a village, for though I believe it enjoys the privileges of a market-town, its cottages built of mud, perhaps shaped into squares and dried in the sun, its roofs of reeds, its wide unpaved sandy roads rather than streets, and its respectable peasant-looking inhabitants, render it almost a perversion of language to call it a town. "It was Sunday, and church (for they are mostly Protestants on the plains) was just over; a number of men, among the best-built and most handsome of any part of Europe, were standing round the town-house after morning service, while several troops of children, each under their respective masters, were returning from school. It was pleasant to see the little fellows, so smart and comfortable did they look in their red Hessian boots, wide white trousers, and lamb-skin coats or cloaks which quite enveloped them, and rendered them not unlike the little animals whose robbed fleeces they wore. "We were so struck with the easy look of the people, and the neatness and apparent comfort of the cottages, that we asked who was the owner of the place? one of them, politely baring his fine head of long black hair, fastened up with a comb, told us, they served no one but their king; they * The levy en masse of the nobles. * were Cumanians. In different parts of Hungary there are certain districts of considerable extent, enjoying immunities and privileges which place them in a very different position from the rest of the country. Among these, the most important are Great Cumania, of which Kardszag is the principal place; Little Cumania; the land of the Jazygers, and the Haiduk towns; all forming portions of the great plain. Hungarian historians are still in doubt as to the precise country formerly occupied by these people, and even as to their original language. There can scarcely, however, be a question that they have sprung from the same eastern stem from which the Magyars themselves branched off, and that their language was essentially the same. At the present day, in no part of Hungary are the language, manners and feelings of the people more truly Magyar than among the Cumanians. In all these districts the peasant is himself lord of the soil, and owns the land; he is, therefore, free from the annoyances of personal service, and is in the enjoyment of the innumerable advantages of propriety. His deputies sit in the Diet. It is true, that in return for this, he bears a more than equal portion of the burthens of the state. With the noble, he is bound to do military service when called on, and to contribute a part in the extraordinary subsidies occasionally granted by the Diet, while with the peasant he pays an equal portion of the heavy government taxes. Notwithstanding these severe drawbacks, he is undoubtedly the most prosperous and happy of the Hungarian peasants; a sure proof and would that legislators knew it !—that it is less the amount, than the manner of taxation, in which its real oppression consists."-Vol. ii. page 521. We now come to the nation properly so called, the populus. This consists of the estates of the realm, or, in Hungarian phrase, the nobles. These estates are four in number: the Prelates, the Magnates, the Simple Nobles, and the Royal Boroughs, each of which, in corpore, is considered as equivalent to one noble. The number of noble families (including the few magnates and prelates) is stated, though very vaguely, at 70,000. The royal boroughs, forty-nine in number, are supposed by Magda to contain 425,000 inhabitants. With regard to the boroughs, they have a charter resembling those of similar institutions in England and elsewhere, independent of the county; and being each equal to one nobleman, they are represented in Parliament. The boroughs claim a vote for each of them separately: the nobles will not allow more than one curial vote to the whole number. Both sides appeal to precedents: in point of equity, both sides are equally unfair. The individual burgher can acquire and possess real property, like a nobleman, but only within the bounds of his borough. On the other hand, they are subject to tithes and general taxes. The prelates and magnates differ from the other nobles not in any civil rights, but in the political rank which entitles them to sit in the Upper House, like our peers and bishops. In other respects the wealthiest Batthyanyi or Esterházy is not more privileged than the simple noble who pursues the respectable trade of butcher or bootmaker. In England, we attach to the word noble the idea of rank and family, if not wealth. Such is far from being the case in Hungary. The number of nobles, however, variously stated from 200,000 to 800,000 persons, appears to an Englishman immensely disproportionate to the mass of the inhabitants; and so it would be if a Hungarian noble were at all the same thing as an English, or even German noble*. The Hungarian noble families, in short, are those in which the adult males enjoy the elective franchise, and are exempt from the burdens which weigh on the peasant. There are thousands and thousands of nobles who plough their own little freeholds (nobiles unius sessionis, who have no peasants under them); many hold copyhold or peasant lands, and perform the dues to the lord like the peasantt: many again are butchers, tailors and shoemakers, particularly makers of Hungarian boots and garments. Many of the nobles, however, are of old and distinguished families, and possess estates, some very large, others small, others of moderate extent. This class answers exactly to our own country gentlemen. Many of the poorer of this class become stewards to wealthier proprietors, or farm the estates of others, or become advocates, professors, clergymen and physicians. In the mountains, where the families have been settled undisturbed for many centuries, and have had more time to multiply, the equal division of property among all the children has by degrees reduced the estates of this class to modest dimensions. In the lower country there are much larger properties. In the Banat and the county of Arad, the land was, up to a comparatively late period, in the hands of * The Hungarian magnate is the same as the English peer. the Turks. After they had been finally expelled, the government found itself, by the death of the original proprietors in these bloody and unremitted wars, in possession of an immense extent of unowned land. Great estates were granted or sold for a trifle, to new families who settled there: the soil is the most productive in Hungary, perhaps in Europe. The families have not yet had time to multiply themselves, at least not at all in proportion to the rise in the value of land there; and at the present moment, in this part of Hungary, may be found untitled nobles who are in the receipt of 10,000l. per annum. In the Upper House, or Table, as it is called, the prelates and magnates have seats*. Their homagium, 400 fl., is double that of the common noble. The prelates are the heads of the Catholic, and what is more surprising, also of the old Greek church. The superintendents of the Protestant confessions have no such distinction. The magnates have partly an official, partly an hereditary rank. The former class comprises the Barones Regni, such as the Index Curiæ Regni, the Ban of Croatia, the royal treasurer (Tavernicorum regalium magister), and various other similar offices; in point of dignity on a par with these are the Obergespans (or Lord Lieutenants of the several counties), as they have a seat in the Upper Table, even though they are only simple nobles. The second class is the same as the English peers, and sit by virtue of hereditary right. But this right is not, as in England, confined to the first-born; the law of primogeniture being not at all congenial to Hungarian feeling. In some houses there are, it is true, entails for the first-born; but this is always the exception, not the rule. They are distinguished by the title of prince, count and baron, respectively. These families may be about as numerous as in England; among them are included the counts and barons of Transylvania (where there is no Upper House), who have the rank and seat of a Hungarian magnate. This class do not on the whole stand in the best odour with their countrymen. Certain it is, that hitherto they have as a body attached themselves to the court, and seemed ra * A magnate may be elected deputy for a county in the Lower House, |