"Yours sincerely,
"FR. PULSZKY."
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The following passages may be given from a long letter, written from Pesth on the 27th of March, 1869. It is for the most part filled with remarks on the party politics of the hour, and persons, many of them still on the scene:—
* * * * *
"MY DEAR MRS. AND MR. TROLLOPE,—You don't believe how glad I was to get a token of remembrance from you. It seems to me quite an age since I left Florence, and your letter was like a voice from a past period. I live here as a stranger; you would not recognise me. I talk nothing but politics and business. There is not a man with whom I could speak in the way that we did on Sundays at your villa. I am of course much with old Deak. I often dine with him. I know all his anecdotes and jokes by heart. He likes it, if I visit him; but our conversation remains within the narrow limits of party politics and the topics of the day. Sometimes I spend an evening with Baron Eotvös, the Minister of Public Instruction, my old friend; and there only we get both warm in remembering the days of our youth, and building châteaux en Espagne for the future of the country. Eotvös has appointed me Director of the National Museum, which contains a library of 180,000 volumes, mostly Hungarian; a very indifferent picture gallery, with a few good pictures and plenty of rubbish; a poor collection of antiquities; splendid mediaeval goldsmith work; arms, coins, and some miserable statues; a good collection of stuffed birds; an excellent one of butterflies; a celebrated one of beetles, and good specimens for geology and mineralogy. But all this collection is badly, if at all, catalogued; badly arranged; and until now we have in a great palace an appropriation of only 1,200_l._ a year. I shall have much to do there—as much as any minister in his office, if politics leave me the necessary time for it.
[Then follows a quantity of details about the party politics of the day. And then he continues:—]
"Such a contested election with us costs about 2,000_l._ to 3,000_l._ I must say I never spent money with more regret than this; but I had to maintain the party interest and my family influence in my electoral district. I have there a fine old castle and a splendid park, but I rarely go to the country, since I have jumped, as you know, once more into the whirlpool of politics, and can't get out again. An agrarian communistic agitation has been initiated, I do not know whether with or without the sanction of S——, but certainly it has spread rapidly over a great portion of the country, and I doubt whether Government has the energy for putting that agitation down. It is a very serious question, especially as it finds us engaged in many other questions of the highest interest.
[Then he gives an outline of the position of Hungary in relation to other States, and then he continues:—]
"We remain still in opposition with the Wallachians, or, as they now like to call themselves, Rumanes, and we try to maintain the peace with Prussia. And now when we should concentrate all our forces to meet the changes which threaten us, a stupid and wicked Opposition divides the nation into two hostile camps [how very singular and unexampled!]. We fight one another to the great pleasure of Russia and Prussia, who enjoy our fratricidal feuds as the Romans in the amphitheatre enjoyed the fights of the barbarians in the arena.