We entered the capital by night; but I fancied, perhaps from having been told so, that I saw something like a look of London round me. Apartments furnished wholly in the Paris taste take off that look a little; so do the public walks and drives which are formed etoile-wise, and moving slowly up and down the avenues, you see large stags, wild boars, &c. grazing at liberty: this is grander than our park, and graver than the Corso. Whenever they lay out a piece of water in this country, it is covered as in ours with swans, who have completely quitted the odoriferous Po for the clear and rapid Danube.
Vienna was not likely to strike one with its churches; yet the old cathedral is majestic, and by no means stript of those ornaments which, while one sect of Christians think it particularly pleasing in the sight of God to retain, is hardly warrantable in another sect, though wiser, to be over-hasty in tearing away. Here are however many devotional figures and chapels left in the streets I see, which, from the tales told in Austrian Lombardy, one had little reason to expect; but the emperor is tender even to the foibles of his Viennese subjects, while he shews little feeling to Italian misery. Men drawing carts along the roads and street afford, indeed, somewhat an awkward proof the government’s lenity when human creatures are levelled with the beasts of burden, and called stott eisel, or stout asses, as I understand, who by this information have learned that the frame which supports a picture is for the same reason called an eisel, as we call a thing to hang clothes on a horse. It is the genius of the German language to degrade all our English words somehow: they call a coach a waggon, and ask a lady if she will buy pomatum to smear her hair with. Such is however the resemblance between their tongue and ours, that the Italians protest they cannot separate either the ideas or the words.
I must mention our going to the post-office with a Venetian friend to look for letters, where, after receiving some surly replies from the people who attended there, our laquais de place reminded my male companions that they should stand uncovered. Finding them however somewhat dilatory in their obedience, a rough fellow snatched the hat from one of their heads, saying, “Don’t you know, Sir, that you are standing before the emperor’s officers?”—“I know,” replied the prompt Italian, “that we are come to a country where people wear their hats in the church, so need not wonder we are bid to take them off in the post-office.” Well, where rulers are said or supposed to be tyrannical, it is rational that good provision should be made for arms; otherwise despotism dwindles into nugatory pompousness and airy show; Prospero’s empire in the enchanted island of Shakespeare is not more shadowy than the sight of princedom united with impotence of power:—such have I seen, but such is not the character of Keysar’s dominion. The arsenal here is the finest thing in the world I suppose; it grieved me to feel the ideas of London and Venice fade before it so; but the enormous size and solidity of the quadrangle, the quantity and disposition of the cannon, bombs, and mortars, filled my mind with enforced respect, and shook my nerves with the thought of what might follow such dreadful preparation.
Nothing can in fact be grander than the sight of the Austrian eagle, all made out in arms, eight ancient heroes sternly frowning round it. The choice has fallen on Cæsar, Pompey, Alexander, Scipio, Hannibal, Fabius Maximus, Cyrus, and Themistocles. I should have thought Pyrrhus worthier the company of all the rest than this last-named hero; but petty criticisms are much less worthy a place in Vienna’s arsenal, which impresses one with a very majestic idea of Imperial greatness.
On the first of November we tried at an excursion into Hungary, where we meant to have surveyed the Danube in all its dignity at Presburgh, and have heard Hayden at Estherhazie. But my being unluckily taken ill, prevented us from prosecuting our journey further than a wretched village, where I was laid up with a fever, and disappointed my company of much hoped-for entertainment. It was curious however to find one’s self within a few posts of the places one had read so much of; and the words Route de Belgrade upon a finger-post gave me sensations of distance never felt before. The comfortable sight of a protestant chapel near me made much amends however. The officiating priests were of the Moravian sect it seems, and dear Mr. Hutton’s image rushed upon my mind. A burial passing by my windows, struck me as very extraordinary: not one follower or even bearer being dressed in black, but all with green robes trimmed with dark brown furs, not robes neither; but like long coats down to the men’s heels, cut in skirts, and trimmed up those skirts as well as round the bottom with fur.
It was a melancholy country that we passed through, very bleak and dismal, and I trust would not have mended upon us had we gone further. The few people one sees are all ignorant, and can all speak Latin—such as it is—very fluently. I have lived with many very knowing people who never could speak it with any fluency at all. Such is life!—and such is learning! I long to talk about the sheep and swine: they seem very worthy of observation; the latter large and finely shaped, of the old savage race; one fancies them like those Eumæus tended, and perhaps they are so; with tusks of singular beauty and whiteness, which the uniformly brown colour of the creature shews off to much advantage; amidst his dark curls, waving all over his high back and long sides, in the manner of a curl-pated baby in England, only that the last is commonly fair and blonde.
The sheep are spotted like our pigs, but prettier; black and yellow like a tortoise-shell cat, with horns as long as those of any he-goat I ever saw, but very different; these animals carrying them straight upright like an antelope, and they are of a spiral shape. Our mutton meantime is detestable; but here are incomparable fish, carp large as small Severn salmon, and they bring them to table cut in pounds, and the joul for a handsome dish. I only wonder one has never heard of any ancient or any modern gluttons driving away to Presburg or Buda, for the sake of eating a fine Danube carp.
With regard to men and women in Hungary, they are not thickly scattered, but their lamentations are loud; the emperor having resumed all the privileges granted them by Maria Theresa in the year 1740, or thereabouts, when distress drove her to shelter in that country, and has prohibited the importation of salt herrings which used to come duty free from Amsterdam, so that their fasts are rendered incommodious from the asperity of the soil, which produces very little vegetable food.
Ground squirrels are frequent in the forests here; but without Pennant’s Synopsis I never remember the Linnæan names of quadrupeds, so can get no information of the animal called a glutton in English, whose skin I see in every fur-shop, and who, I fancy, inhabits our Hungarian woods.
The Imperial collection of pictures here is really a magnificent repository of Italian taste, Flemish colouring, and Dutch exactness: in which the Baptist, by Giulio Romano, the crucifixion by Vandyke, and the physician holding up a bottle to the light by Gerard Douw, are great examples.