of Hungary, and Transylvania, Dalmatia, Croatia, Serria,and Bulgaria. By A.
A. right of the two volumes just named. We never came across a work which more conscientiously and accurately does exactly what it professes to do. That strange congeries of races which form the border line between the German and the Turk has been much neg- lected and much misunderstood : neglected through ignorance, and misunderstood through neglect. Mr. Paton is, as far as we are aware, the only Englishman of any literary ability who has definitely determined to know those facts about their history and position which can only be ascertained by personal examination and inquiry. The book before us is not a new one. The author indeed says in the preface that, "in reality," it is so ; a phrase which in general implies that by a figure of speech the fact may be conceived to be as it is stated. To speak impartially, however, the work is but a new edition, considerably revised and improved, of four smaller works published during the last fifteen years. With the first of them the excellent monograph on Servia, we have no previous acquaintance. The "Goth and the Hun," the book by which Mr. Paton is most widely known, occupies the greater part of the second of these two volumes; the " Highlands and Islands of the Adriatic," published in 1849, a work which never became very popular, forms, stripped of pictures, the staple of the first; and the remaining part of the pre- sent republication is a reprint of a small description of the early events of the Russian War, which owed its merit to the thorough familiarity of Mr. Paton with the scenes in which that struggle commenced.
The tide of Turkish conquest, when it rolled back two centuries ago before the victorious sword of Sobieski, left on the banks of the Danube a diluvium of races, compared with which the intermixture of population in England, Malta, or Italy, is simplicity itself. It is not that the races which unite in these districts are themselves in- distinguishable, or that the facts of their history are obscure; the difficulty is, that the facts seem so frequently opposed to what we should have expected from the data. Slavonic races, for example, have always failed, as Mr. Paton pointed out in the preface to one of his original works, in encountering Germans successfully ; yet, some- how or other, Slaves had mysteriously penetrated, long before the time of Charlemagne, to the very west of Germany. They have not generally succeeded, again, in adapting themselves to constitutional government ; yet the Servians, who are Slaves, enjoy at this day the forms of a liberal constitution. Hungary, the most puzzling of all political problems, is composed of races as different in their origin as Englishman and Negro, which yet now harmonize perfectly in their struggle for freedom : while, at the period when this harmony did not exist, it was the Magyars—a people of Ugrian descent—who domi- neered over the Tcheks, the intelligent race whose brethren are the Moravians and Bohemians. The results of the battle of Presburg have never to this day been reversed, and it was a victory of Turanians over Aryans. Not less strange are the caprices which limit the language of these tribes, which give Latin to Wallachia, leave Bulgaria and Servia their Slavonic speech, spread Turkish here and there in groups of Moslem villages, and confine in Albania & people who speak, it is not too much to say, Heaven only knows what. The confusion of races is not likely to be diminished, more- over, if travellers are to invent fresh names for themselves. " Wal- lachia "—possibly the same name as "Welsh"—is already not of native origin; and we cannot see Mr. Paton's right to impose the term Daco-Roman on the Wallachians of Southern Hungary, when those of the Lower Danube have just as good a title to the fictitious, and not very useful, appellation.
Through this labyrinth of races and dialects Mr. Paton is, how- ever, an invaluable guide. He is at home in Elyria and Dalmatia, on the slopes of the Balkan, on the coasts of the Euxine, on the banks of the Danube and the Savi. He is not a passionless scribe. He has his political views. He says, indeed, that lie does not intend to mention them, but there they are. He blesses Turkey, and curses Russia ; he blesses the Hungarians generally, but curses the Magyars specially; be blesses Austria, and totally neglects Great Britain and France; he blesses peace, and curses war; lie blesses strong govern- ments, and thinks constitutionalism a very good thing in its way. But it is only fair to say that he is as impartial in his statements of what he sees, and in the delightful sketches of history with which he varies the narrative, as any one could desire. He does not shrink from stating an opinion on persons and things; but it is easy to see that it is in every case an opinion honestly arrived at by examining all the accessible facts. It is with the chapters of history the readers will generally be most pleased. That on the history of Servia con- tains exactly enough, and not too much; or rather, it would contain exactly enough if it included the events of the last twenty years, which it designedly omits. But the rise of the Servian kingdom, its overthrow at Kossova, the insurrection of Kara Georg, and the in- trigues and success of Milosh, are most graphically told. The history of Montenegro is equally good, and the sketches of the vivid drama of Hungary, though here it will be felt that national character is a subject upon which people with the same data before them may form very different estimates. The fact is, that while nothing is more easy to appreciate in a barbarous or semi-barbarous community, hardly anything is more difficult to ascertain when the nation is educated and civilized. Mr. Paton, himself the hardest of workers, is a little too indulgent to national uselessness. Turkey he considers a poli- tical necessity, and a Magyar preponderance lie thinks hurtful to European interests ; accordingly, while he has but the faintest praise for the generous spirit of the latter, he cannot find it in his heart to blame the hideous apathy and corruption of Osmanli government in Europe. There have been, it seems to us, in the history of the world, two great races, and two only, which have conquered by
bravery and perseverance enormous tracts of country, and having won them, have kept them. One is the race on whose dominions the light of progress, of liberal ideas, liberal institutions, never sets. The other is a race which, under the form of Huns, of Avars, of Turks—all no doubt akin—has influenced the fate of nations more than any other in the world. For fourteen centuries it has fought, ruled, resisted. Twice it has destroyed the greatest empires of Europe ; once it seemed likely to overwhelm Europe itself. It rules without sympathy, exists without progress, administers without fore- thought. It is more corrupt than the most corrupt democracy, and more reckless than the most headstrong despotism. It is fana- tical, and yet weak ; jealous, and yet indolent. Its police, its education, its provincial organization, its finances, its very roads, are hopelessly and utterly bad-. It has never given to the world one single useful invention, or one single noble or generous thought. On the actual state of Hungary Mr. Paton's narrative is as valu- able as it is interesting. It is true that events have made many changes since the year 1849; but places do not change, nor manners, nor historical events. The results at which he arrives he states very distinctly. We have already said that he deprecates sympathy with the repeal party in Hungary. This he does, in the first place, be- cause Hungary is more likely to prosper when in legislative union with Austria; and, in the second, because legislative disunion implies Magyar ascendancy—the success, that is, as he thinks, of a party
"that has broken down in its attempts to break up the Austrian empire, and who for this purpose have invented a strange and monstrous vocabulary unknown to history and common sense ; who call social spoliation aboli- tion of feudalism;' who called the disruption of the military and financial resources of a great empire 'a reform ;' and who, after the fall of absolutism in Austria, instead of stretching out the right hand of fellowship to the party of rational liberty and constitutional reforms, adulterated the sound principles of reform with the unsound principles of repeal, and thus pro-
cured martial law at home In short, the path of the Hungarian reformer lay as straight before him as the fair way of a harbour of easy access ; but the rock upon which he split was ultra-Magyarism—not the improvement of constitutional government, but something altogether foreign to municipal and constitutional government—that is to say, egotism, not of a class such as that of noble over ignoble, or of democrat against aris- tocrat, but of one particular race, language, and nationality, over the other languages and nationalities. It was this aberration from the high road of reform into the quagmire of national egotism that is the most striking phenomena of the modem history of Hungary."
We are quite prepared to sympathize with Mr. Paton in his objec- tions to such measures as the "abolition of feudalism"--one of those strong steps of which the possible prospective benefits cannot com- pensate for their enormous mischief at the moment. But in his views of feudalism it is less easy to agree with him, for the simple reason that he employs such words in unusual senses. Constantly throughout the book he contrasts feudalism with centralization, as if they were simply the opposite poles of national life. "While a great part of Asia," he says, 'remains feudal, the Ottoman Empire from its vicinity to Europe, has, in this century, been drawn within the centralizing vortex.' Now, by feudalism is generally understood the unconstitutional dependence of the mass of the people on nobles, each of whom forms himself part of a combined system. If this be so, China is not feudal. Feudalism in many parts of India is not an original, but an engrafted system. The Malay races are not feudally administered; the Tartar races only partially. Nor is there any inherent connexion or opposition between feudalism and centraliza- tion as stages of national progress. The Bushmen are as decen- tralized as they can be, and feudalism is unknown among them. Or, to take a civilized people, the Northern States of America have cer- tainly no feudal element, and there is no nation so little centralized in the world.
The Danube and the Adriatic is printed at Leipzig, and of course on paper of that flimsy texture which is so suggestive of all that is most solid in the contents ; that same paper on which Wunder's re- ferences are so hard to verify, and Euclid's grammar so impossible to analyze. But the paper and the print suit Mr. Paton to perfection. He is a thorough German—a German of the best type. No other man would devote himself with such perseverance and sagacity to subjects of which the interest, in many cases, has yet to be made known to the world. No other could write so simply and accurately, with, at the same time, so lively an egoism and so didactic a tone. Here and there, too, there is the faint German humour, which con- sists chiefly in quaint changes of subject and a Dutch faithfulness of detail—here a piece of historic narrative, not long enough to be dull, and there a description of manners or conversation almost reminding one of Eothen. Above all, Mr. Paton really takes an interest in the smallest parts of his work. May he long live, to give us both his facts and his theories. He has so far forgotten England, we notice, as to inform an Illyrian friend that one-third of the population of Great Britain is Roman Catholic. But he knows still what kind of book will please an English public. It is impossible to help remem- bering, too, that a pure Austrian work—" The Voyage of the Novara" —with its gorgeous print, its excellent engravings, and the glory and majesty of its pride of original research, succeeds in presenting to the world in the first volume precisely one original discovery—the nature of the pseudo-volcanoes in the Indian Ocean; while Mr. Paton's unpretending volumes touch no subject whatever without casting upon it the ample light which intelligence and perseverance are sure to bring in their train. We may apply to Mr. Paton the general sentiment, if not the exact words, with which the monk pro- posed his health in Servia :
"You are a great traveller in our eyes, for none of.us ever went further than Syrmium. The greatest traveller of your country that we know of
was that wonderful navigator, Robinson Crusoe, of York, who, poor man, met with many and great difficulties, but at length, by the blessing of God, was restored to his native country and his friends. We trust that the Almighty will guard over you, and that you will never, in the course of your voyages and travels, be thrown like him on a desert island. And now we drink your health and long life to you."
Ouvz BLAKE'S GOOD WORK.-We are assured that, in our cri- ticism on this novel, we have done one injustice to Mr. Je,affreson. The assignment of Lord Byfield's property to his first legal wife, which we called impossible, was, we are assured, submitted to prac- tical lawyers before it appeared. We have ourselves seen an opinion from an eminent conveyancer in favour of the deed. It might have been illegal without Olive's consent, but then she was a party to the arrangement, and herself dictated its terms. It was perhaps a little hypercritical to refer to the matter at all, but in these novels of inci- dent the only room left for true art consists in the perfect naturalness and reality of every detail.
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