But whether Metternich or Ferdinand were to blame in the matter, the concessions of the King were made in a hesitating and grudging manner which took away their grace, and made the defeat more vividly apparent both to victors and spectators.
A more popular Chancellor of Hungary, Anton Mailath, was appointed; another member of the same family was made chief justice; and about the same time the Transylvanian Diet was restored. Hoping that he had now conciliated popular feeling, Metternich, in 1839, called together the Diet of Presburg and demanded four million florins and thirty-eight thousand recruits.
But the members of the Assembly had been instructed by their constituents to oppose any demands of the Government until Wesselenyi, Kossuth, and the members of a club who had been arrested at the same time, were liberated. And while Deak still led the opposition in the Lower House, Count Louis Batthyanyi came forward as the champion of freedom in the House of Magnates. Finally, the Emperor consented, not only to grant an amnesty to Wesselenyi, Kossuth, and others, but to pass that clause about the peasants' dues which he had vetoed in 1836. The Diet then voted the money, and was dissolved.
Thus, while in Italy a new faith was springing up which was to supply a force to the struggles for liberty that they had previously lacked, in Hungary the different, but hardly less effective, power of old traditions of Constitutional freedom was checking Metternich in his full career of tyranny, and forcing him to confess a defeat inflicted, not by foreign diplomatists, but by that very people who had rallied round Maria Theresa in her hour of danger, and who had sternly rejected the advances of Napoleon when he had invited them to separate their cause from that of the House of Austria.
CHAPTER IV.
LANGUAGE AND LEARNING AGAINST DESPOTISM. 1840-1846.
Contrast between position of German language in North Germany and in Austrian Empire.—Condition of Germany between 1819 and 1840.—Literary movements.—Protest of the Professors of Göttingen against abolition of Hanoverian Constitution.—Effect of the protest on other parts of Germany.—Position and character of Frederick William III.—His struggle with the Archbishop of Cologne.—Accession of Frederick William IV.—His character and policy.—Ronge's movement of Church Reform.—Robert Blum's share in it.—Language movement in Hungary.—Position and history of Croatia.—Louis Gaj and the "Illyrian" movement.—"The Slavonic ocean and the Magyar island."—Kossuth's treatment of the Slavonic movement.—Count Zay's circular.—The "taxation of the nobles."—Szechenyi's position.—Deak's resignation.—The Croats at Presburg.—Kossuth's inconsistency.—Ferdinand's intervention in the struggle.—The struggle of races absorbs all other questions.—History of Transylvania.—The "three nations."—The position of the Roumanians.—Effect of Joseph II.'s policy in Transylvania.—The "Libellus Wallachorum."—Andreas Schaguna.—Stephan Ludwig Roth.—General summary of the effect of the revival of national feelings.
'Twas from no Augustan age,
No Lorenzo's patronage,
That the German singers rose;
By no outward glories crowned,
By no prince's praise renowned,
German art's first blossom blows.
From her country's greatest son,
From the mighty Frederick's throne,
Scorned, the Muse must turn away.
"We have given thy worth to thee;"
"Let our heart-beats prouder be;"
Can each German boldly say.
So to loftier heights arose,
So in waves more swelling flows
German poet's minstrelsy.
He in ripeness all his own,
From his heart's deep centre grown,
Scorns the rule of pedantry.