my Calvinist friends argued, or shall I say on account of it, I still inclined to the opinion I formed on this subject during my first visit to the country. This was that although the amount of tolerance, or indifference, call it what we will, which prevails among the Hungarian Calvinists is much greater than would be generally approved of in England, yet a still greater amount prevails among the Hungarian Catholics. Nor is the cause of this far to seek. A sincere belief in some strong distinctive tenet is necessary to all religious intolerance. Now, although a large proportion of my Hungarian friends are Catholics, and many of them very devout ones, ones, fulfilling, as far as a stranger can judge, all their religious duties, yet I do not recollect in the behaviour of any of them any sign of their considering either myself or their Protestant neighbours without the pale of salvation. On the other hand, the Calvinists certainly do believe, and they are occasionally so impolite as to parade this belief in society, that the worship of the Church of Rome is a scarcely modified idolatry, at variance with Scripture and common sense. Besides which, I have found among the Hungarian Calvinists that undefinable assumption of intellectual superiority which their coreligionists assume all over the world whenever their attention is turned towards the errors of the "poor benighted Papists;" than which I can conceive few things more galling.

Still, in spite of everything, the professors of the two religions contrive for the most part to live in peace and amity with each other. A proof of this is afforded by the great number of mixed marriages, in which the wife is generally the Catholic ;-at least such has been the tenor of my experience, and I have sought to explain the fact by the inequality of the law regulating the education of the offspring of such unions. When the husband is a Catholic, all the children must be brought up as such; where, however, the husband is a Protestant, he is allowed to bring up the sons in his own faith, while the daughters must follow the religion of their mother. I have often been an inmate of houses in which the mistress receives the parish priest or the monk from a neighbouring convent as a frequent and honoured guest, fasts upon Friday and during Advent and Lent, goes regularly to mass, &c., &c., and yet lives in perfect conjugal harmony with her heretic husband, and conscientiously abstains from all attempts to influence the faith of her heretic sons. Where such attempts are made, I have found them made by the Protestant party, which has contrived to evade the provisions of the law and the vigilance of the priest, neither of which present in this country any really insuperable obstacle to a determined parent blessed with a compliant or indifferent spouse. On the other hand I have known one instance in which a Catholic lady, judicially separated from an eccentric and ill-conditioned husband, belonging to a well-known

family among the Calvinists, but who had put the finishing stroke to his previous strange conduct by apostatizing to Catholicismscandal said from interested motives-actually exerting herself to prevent his carrying his young sons over with him to what had thus become their common Church.

Amongst such a people it may be easily imagined that the Primate's pastoral was received with great indignation by the large majority of the Catholic gentry, who were indeed more irritated by it than their Protestant brethren. As patriots they were especially indignant at the attempt thus made to divide into two hostile camps the defenders of a common country; that at the very moment when the calmest deliberation was required, men's minds should be inflamed and their reason disturbed by an appeal to their religious feelings. It was an additional aggravation that such an attempt had been made by one, from whose great age and exalted station a wiser and sounder course of policy was to be expected, especially when they remembered the enthusiastic loyalty (the expression is scarcely too strong) which had been manifested by persons of all classes and all creeds towards this same old man in 1861. But besides that they condemned, as patriots, the step taken by the chief pastor of their Church, they also resented, as Catholic laymen, what they considered an encroachment on the part of the clergy on matters lying without their peculiar sphere. The texts, "Render to Cæsar the things which are Caesar's," and "My kingdom is not of this world," were freely quoted. Surely they, the "nobles" of Hungary, the hereditary defenders of her liberties, might be trusted to elect the national senate, or to guide the mass of their fellow-countrymen in their choice. At any rate they did not choose in this matter to submit to the dictation, or even the advice, of the lords spiritual, who, it was now remembered, had often shown a disposition to be subservient to the Court, and to embrace with eagerness all sorts of anti-national importations from Germany.

Such was the state of feeling just before the last elections, and such the sentiments which I either heard in conversation around me, or picked out of the provincial correspondence which at that time filled so large a space in the daily papers of Pest. The county of Gwas one of those in which these feelings were especially aroused. Not only are both the Bishop and the Chapter of Gamong the richest in Hungary, but three wealthy monastic Orders, the Benedictines, the Cistercians, and the Præmonstratensians, have large landed estates in the county. The other proprietors are for the most part small, nor do the Protestants of both denominations make up more than a fourth part of the population of the county and borough together. Yet, in spite of all these grounds for expecting an ascendency of conservative and clerical influences, out of the four

deputies returned by these two municipalities in 1861, two were Protestants, and all four were, or were supposed to be, decidedly liberal, if not ultra, in their political views. This time, however, the clergy determined to put forth all their might, and, as will be seen, they were to some extent successful.

The laws of 1848 direct that in appointing the polling place of a district especial regard is to be had to a central position, and facility of communication with the whole of the district. I ought, by-thebye, to mention that in no case can there be more than one polling place, or indeed than one polling-booth, in a district; and in order that an election should be legal, the votes must be received uninterruptedly as long as electors continue to present themselves. Thus if night falls before their work is over, the Deputation must continue it through the night, as to adjourn it till the morning would invalidate the whole. According to the Hungarian way of looking at it, such adjournment would be equivalent to shutting the door in the face of a qualified elector, and thus curtailing his legal rights. In many cases it would be very inconvenient for a peasant to call again the next day. There were instances during the late elections, where the voting went on until two o'clock in the morning, and in the other contested election in the county of G-- it was eleven o'clock at night before the result was proclaimed. As in consequence of these arrangements the main point to be considered in fixing on a polling place is accessibility to the whole constituency, many of them are little places of no other importance. T is a case in point. Even in Hungary it bears only the title of a village, and in that country many places are called towns which we in England should consider as villages. It is a large straggling labyrinth of cottages, most of them substantial and comfortable, with a broad highroad running right through it. The population is estimated at 2,000 souls. As is generally the case with Magyar villages, the population belong to different religious denominations; which fact is made evident to the outward eye by its two churches, one Catholic, and the other Lutheran. The former is comfortably situated in the midst of the village, the atter lies outside. Originally it stood in the very centre, but Maria Theresa, a very religious lady, who from a tender solicitude for the spiritual welfare of her subjects, waged during her long reign of forty years a cautious but continuous war against the heresies of Protestantism and the schism of the Greek Church, ordained that though the former might retain their churches, these were not to stand within the village bounds. T― was one of the places in which the Lutherans were so weak or their opponents so powerful, that the ordinance was carried into effect. The former site of the church was still marked by the belfry which was left standing. Thus the bells of the Protestants sounded in the midst of the houses, and at their

summons the congregation trooped out to their isolated house of prayer. These facts were communicated to me by the esperes, an officer in the Protestant churches corresponding to our archdeacon. It was at his house that I dined on the day of the election. But I am anticipating.

As I mentioned above, the "deputation" sent out by the "central committee" to conduct an election, consists nominally of three persons-a president, a vice-president, and a notary. The president on this occasion was indisposed, and consequently represented by a substitute, a gentleman with whom I did not become so well acquainted as with the other members. The morning after my arrival at G——, I started with the notary in his light, open waggon, each of us wrapped up in our wolfskin bundas, for his puszta, distant about half an hour's drive from the village of T. He was a quiet, sensible Protestant, who had not long married a young wife and built a new house, and had a young family springing up around him. In the afternoon we were joined by the vice-president, who slept, as I did, at the lonely farm. He, be it observed, was a Catholic. He was taller than the Hungarians generally are, but to the full as broadshouldered and stout-limbed as any of them. But the physical peculiarity, which displayed itself to most advantage at the election, was the power and endurance of his lungs. Although, after a long day's work, shouting out the names of about 1,800 voters, and occasionally explaining with some acerbity of language, to a confused peasant, what he was expected to do or say, he assured us that "die Brust ist schon beim Teufel," he did it in such a loud, gruff tone of voice, that it was impossible to believe him.

The deputation" are technically supposed to be quite impartial as regards the two candidates. In the present case, although I neither saw nor heard of anything which could be construed into an act of unfairness, the "deputation" did not take the useless trouble to disguise their sympathies in favour of my Protestant friend, the former representative of the district in 1861. In this respect the vice-president, though a Catholic, was as decided as any one of them. This was the more interesting because I found that his opinions were to a great measure conservative, and even what many persons in England would call anti-liberal. Such, for instance, were his ideas as to the necessity of keeping a tight hold upon the peasant, whom, however, he admitted to have a strong, sound, natural sense of justice. His philosophy on this point was summed up in one sentence, which he delivered with regard to the management of the Hungarian common soldier. "An officer," said he, "who understands a hussar, will always beat him when he deserves it, and will beat him severely; but he will take care first of all to ascertain clearly whether he has deserved it or not.”

After this gentleman had come over from his own house on the edge of the district to stay at the notary's, it was determined to call on the candidate, who lived in the village, which we forthwith proceeded to do. The open waggon was again brought out, with its pair of active, little Hungarian horses; cigars were lighted, our wolfskin pelisses again hung around us, and away we rattled. When I use the word "candidate," I probably give the reader an entirely mistaken idea of the gentleman's character and conduct. On our arrival we had to wait some time before he appeared, for he was busymeasuring oats in the granary. One of us compared him to Cincinnatus; nor was the comparison inapposite. If the senate sent for him to save Rome, well, he would do his honest best to save her; till then, he preferred attending to his little farm. I conversed with him about the probability of his success on the morrow, about the support which had been promised him, and such-like things. But I found him not merely calm, almost indifferent on the subject, but to a great extent ignorant. He said: "The Protestants who will vote for me to-morrow I know, because I am accustomed to meet them in the consistory; but I do not know the Catholics who will vote for These gentlemen are good enough to interest themselves in my election, and to canvass for me; but I myself have not asked a single Catholic for his vote."

me.

This indifference was not at all affected or assumed. If he left his property to go and live as a deputy at Pest, he would certainly gain no pecuniary advantage for himself; and, as he belonged to the

Left," not to say the "extreme Left,"-he entertained little or no hopes of any fair terms being obtained from the Emperor's government. To what end, then, should he disturb the even tenor of his daily life? Meanwhile, he showed us a rambling diatribe against him which was being circulated by the opposite party. Its purport may be summed up in the text quoted at the outset, multi sunt antichristi. Apropos of this squib, I observed that it was easy for me to imagine the sort of arguments which the priests brought against his re-election, but what I wanted to know was what sort of arguments his supporters could use in his favour which could be adapted to the understanding of a Catholic peasant. The best answer I could get to my question was the somewhat vague one given by the vice-president, who said: "Die Intelligenz imponirt dem Bauer;" that is, the peasant is affected, or impressed, by the opinion of the educated classes. I believe that is about the truth of the matter. The strongest argument which a richer landed proprietor can use to a poorer landed proprietor, is that of the community of their interests. I once put a similar question to a Transylvanian count, whose answer was substantially this: "I say to him, Thou seest that I live from my land, my farm, as thou dost from