IN THE MARKET.

parable with the better universities of Germany. It suffered somewhat, twenty years ago, by the precipitate expulsion of the German faculty and the too sudden transformation from a German to a Hungarian basis. But it has recovered, and now has a truly national character and influence. Another important official educational establishment, the Royal Polytechnic Institute, with important technical courses in engineering and applied science, flourishes at Budapest. Then comes a series of collegiate establishments, gymnasien and real-schulen, some of which are national and municipal, while others are denominational with public subventions. Below these are the advanced schools for boys and girls, corresponding in their work to our upper grammarand lower high-school grades, and having

certain industrial and practical features. On the same level are certain mercantile and trade schools. And then come the numerous elementary schools, the accommodations of which are intended to be equal to the requirements of the Compulsory Education Act; for throughout Austria and Hungary elementary education has for a number of years been obligatory upon all. The children learn perfectly both the Hungarian and the German languages, and not infrequently they learn something of either French or English.

The Hungarians, like all the people of southeastern Europe, are ready linguists. But the ease with which they acquire other languages does not diminish their devotion to their own. The Hungarian, or Magyar, speech has no affinity with the other languages of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It is more closely related to the Turkish than to any other tongue. It is a concise language, flexible, musical, and has a rich vocabulary; and its most enthusiastic defenders are men who cannot be charged with ignorance of the capabilities of the three leading languages of western Europe. An extensive and growing Magyar literature exists, and the book-shops of Budapest teem with new productions in all fields of thought. The press of Budapest is also very active. Indeed, the Hungarians claim that nowhere else in Europe is journalism so free, and so influential in molding opinion and guiding affairs. An extraordinary number of the leading men in Parliament are or have been journalists. A Budapest writer has lately remarked that "all the men who can be regarded as distinguished and important in the field of Hungarian politics stand in close relation to the press: Louis Kossuth was a journalist; Francis Deák entered upon his work of adjusting Hungarian and Austrian relations

with a series of newspaper articles; and in the list of journalist statesmen stand the names of the brilliant Anton Csengery, Baron Sigismund Kemény, Moritz Jókai, Max Falk, Louis Csernátony; in a word, the most important of the public men of Hungary are journalists, for even the Prime Minister Tisza himself, in his time, when leader of the opposition, cultivated public opinion through the columns of a Hungarian journal." In Budapest alone there are now more than 230 different periodicals published in the Hungarian language, while there are at least 40 in the German tongue. And there are a dozen important daily papers.

The Hungarian people have musical and artistic talents of the highest order, and their gifted sons are constantly seeking and winning the rewards that the larger European capitals have to offer. The painters and sculptors of Budapest go to Paris. The musicians are to be found everywhere. The most distinguished violin virtuosos and professors of Europe, from Joachim of Berlin down to men of lesser note, are nearly all Hungarians. One of the ornaments of the Andrássy-strasse is the Conservatory of Music, where Liszt was formerly the presiding genius. The high honors of the Paris Exposition were awarded to a Hungarian painter, Munkacsky. The musical and artistic activity of Budapest is very considerable, and it also has received great impetus from the causes which have led to the recent expansion of all interests in the Magyar capital. The Government maintains a National Theater that has played an important part in the patriotic and intellectual life of the people, encouraging poetic and literary activity, and upholding the national speech. Even more successful, if possible, in these respects is the Volks Theater, which, supported by the municipal government and conducted upon the most popular plan, fills a prominent place in the life of the community. The most imposing structure devoted to musical and dramatic art is the new Royal Opera, supported by the Government, in the Andrássy-strasse. It is one of the two or three finest opera-houses in Europe, in magnificence hardly coming short of those in Vienna and Paris. The large German element, and indeed the whole community, for everybody understands the German lanquage, is kept in touch with the musical and dramatic art of the German empire and of Austria through the Deutsch Theater, a splendid and thoroughly popular house, managed with rare tact and judgment. It is not necessary to mention any of the minor theatrical institutions. The four great ones already named would redound to the credit of any city.

If Budapest were possessed of no other attractions whatsoever, its remarkable hot springs and mineral waters, unequaled for the variety VOL XLIV.-24.

of their curative properties by any other group of medicinal springs in the entire world, should give the place great fame. Its warm spring baths are very ancient. The Romans utilized them, and they called Buda "Aquincum (Five-waters), with reference to the five springs that were known and used. The Huns also prized the healing waters; and finally the Turks, during their period of domination, built great public baths, and regarded the waters as possessed of the highest virtue. Some of these baths now belong to the municipality and some are private property. For the most part they lie on the Buda side of the river. Especially noted are the "Kaiser-bad," the "Lukas-bad," and the "Königs-bad," belonging to the Josephsberg group, and lying at the base of that conspicuous eminence. To the same group belong the baths of the Margareta Island. Comfortable hotels adjoin these springs, and the bathing-establishments for the most part are commodious and even luxurious. A more beautiful health-resort than the "Margareten-Insel" can be found nowhere. Another group includes the " Raitzen-bad," the "Bruck-bad," and the "Blocks-bad," lying a little distance further down the river and in the vicinity of the Blocksberg promontory. On the other side of the city, in the Stadtwaldchen Park, the municipal authorities have a hot sulphur-bath establishment, supplied with water by an artesian well nearly three thousand feet deep. The saline constituents of these various sources are different, and some of the springs are recommended for one class of diseases, and some for another. The waters are used either externally, internally, or both, according to the case to be treated. There are in use some interesting old remains of Turkish bath-house architecture, notably one belonging to the municipality, the "Rudas-bad." The modern buildings are not magnificent, but they are handsome and comfortable.

Just out of Buda, in a little plain surrounded by high hills, are the well-known "bitter-water" springs which have made the name of Hungary more famous perhaps than any other article of export. These curative mineral waters are bottled in vast quantities and sent to all parts of the world. The "Hunyadi" water, the "FranzJosef," the "Königs-bitter-wasser," and the

become at some time a property yielding a direct and large municipal revenue.

Enough has been said, perhaps, to show that Budapest has become in recent years one of the best-appointed of modern cities. Its streets are handsome and clean, asphalt being the prevailing material; its drainage is good; its health-system is producing beneficent results; its water-supply is about to be enlarged and perfected; its local transportation system is fairly adequate; its building regulations are producing a well-constructed and handsome city; and its provisions for education and recreation are highly creditable. Its public buildings are of good architecture and of considerable variety. A splendid new building is about to be erected for the housing of the municipal government, the offices now being distributed among several city buildings. One of these, the famous "Redout building," is an imposing structure containing a vast public hall for balls and entertainments, the ground floor being used as a fashionable restaurant and café. Of "private-public" buildings, as hospitals, schools, academies of art or science, hotels, and the like, the city has a most creditable supply. One of the conspicuous objects on the quay in the lower part of Pest is a large grain elevator, built of brick in a most ornamental style of architecture, and owned and operated by the municipal government with the idea of promoting the grain trade and also of introducing, by example, this modern American institution. It is perhaps the only grain-elevator in Hungary. It is a needlessly costly building, but it has proved itself a valuable adjunct to the trade of the town, and within a few years, undoubtedly, private enterprise will multiply the number of these establishments.

The prospects for Budapest's continued growth as a Danubian metropolis are very bright. As the center of the Hungarian staterailway system, its commercial importance is constantly enhanced by the development of the resources of the country and the corresponding increase of traffic. And it is no longer doubtful that the capital will be the gainer to an enormous extent by the new "zone tariff" put in operation on the staterailway system in August, 1889.1 This remarkable innovation in railroading entirely changes the passenger-ticket system. From Budapest as a center 14 zones are described, the first having a radius of 25 kilometers. The second is a belt lying between the inner circle and an outer one drawn with a 40 kilometer radius; i. e., its width is 15 kilometers. Successive zones have a radius from the Budapest center of 70, 85, 100, 115, 130, 145, 160, 175, 200, and 225 kilometers, while to the fourteenth 1 See "Topics of the Time" for December, 1890.

zone are assigned all distances on any of the Hungarian state lines that lie more than 225 kilometers away from the capital. For any point in each of these zones the fare is the same. The new rates are greatly reduced, being in some cases one half and in other cases less than one fourth the former rates. The average reduction is not far from two thirds. Railway bookkeeping is of course simplified by the new system, and traveling has received an unwonted stimulus. It is now conceded that the innovation is a success from the point of view of railway financiering; and it is even more brilliant a success from the point of view of the commercial and social progress of the capital city. It has given new movement and life to the sluggish population of the outlying parts of Hungary. Thus in 1880 the entire number of persons carried by the principal transportation companies of the whole country was only 2,000,000; and in 1885, the year of Budapest's exposition, the number aggregated only about 2,800,000. But in 1889, as a result of five months of the zone tariff, the number reached nearly 5,500,000, while in 1890 it was about 6,850,000, and was considerably greater still in 1891. Taking the Hungarian state railways alone, for the three years 1888, 1889, and 1890, we find passenger traffic amounting respectively to 841,462, 1,944,588, and 2,936,771. The Austro-Hungarian system of roads was obliged to meet the new rates and methods, and its Hungarian lines, which in the half-decade preceding 1889 had carried 900,000 people per annum, are now carrying some 2,000,000 yearly. To show more clearly the local effect upon the movement of travel to and from Budapest, it may be stated that at the central station of the Hungarian staterailway system the arrivals and departures were 743,000 in 1888 and 2,740,000 in 1890, the change having been wrought altogether by the cheapened rates and the general convenience of the zone system. At the station of the Austro-Hungarian lines also the movement has fully doubled in consequence of the new policy. Great results in like manner are following the more recent adoption of zone tariffs and reduced rates for freight traffic.

Thus the Danube valley has at length begun to show development under the magic of modern industrial forces; and its progress within the coming half-century bids fair to exceed that of some newer regions of the Western world. Budapest promises to wrest from Vienna the commercial ascendency of the lower Danube valley, and it is possible that there may be in store for it a very brilliant political future as the capital of a Danubian confederation that shall include Hungary and the smaller states of the Southeast. That this is the ambition of many

E have considered ancient poetry, the Hebraic and the classic, from which we so largely derive, finding even in that of the Augustan prime a marked departure from the originative temper of the earlier literatures. Centuries afterward, in Persia, the "Shah Nameh," or Book of Kings, furnished a striking instance of heroic composition: the work of a royal genius- Firdusi, whose name, signifying Paradise, was given him by the great Mahmoud because he had made that Caliph's court as resplendent as Eden through his epic of "Rustem and Sohrab," his song of "the rise, combats, death "1 of the Parsee religion and nationality. To produce an epic deliberately that would simulate the primitive mold and manner, in spite of a subjective, almost modern, spirit, seems to have been the privilege of an Oriental, and, from our point of view, halfbarbaric, race.

The strength of the Homeric poems and of the sagas of the North betrays the gladness out of which they sprang, the joy that a man-child is born into the world. They were men-children indeed. Compared with our own recitals - with even Tasso's "Jerusalem," Ariosto's "Orlando," or the "Lusiad" of Camoëns-their voice is that of the ocean heard before the sighing of reeds along a river's brim. Nevertheless, we must note that of the few great world-poems the subjective element claims its almost equal share.

As we leave the classic garden there stands one mighty figure with the archangelic flaming sword. After Dante it may be said that "the world is all before" us "where to choose." Behind him, strive as we may with renaissance and imitation, we need not and cannot return. Heine says that "every epoch is a sphinx which plunges into the abyss as soon as its problem is solved." After a thousand years of the fermentation caused by the pouring in of Christianity upon the lees of paganism, a cycle ended; the shade of Dante arose, and brooded above the deep. From his time there was light again.

1 Gosse's Introduction to Miss Zimmern's
66 'Stories Retold from Firdusi."

A climacteric epoch had expired in giving him birth. His own age became Dante, as if by one of the metamorphoses in the "Inferno." And the "Divine Comedy" is equally one with its creator. The age, the poem, the poet, alike are Dante; his epic is a trinity in spirit as in form. Its passion is the incremental heat that serves to weld antique and modern conceptions, the old dispensation and the new.

It is said that great poets are always before or behind their ages; Dante was no exception, yet he preeminently lived within his time. Above all else, his epic declares the intense personality that must have voice; not merely expression of the emotion that inspired his minor numbers-themselves enough for fameaddressed to Beatrice, but also of his insight concerning the master forces of human life and faith and the historic turmoil of his era. It was composed when he had matured through knowledge and experience to that ethical comprehension which is the sustaining energy of Job, of the Greek dramatists, of Shakspere, Milton, and Goethe. Then he cast his spirit, as one takes a mold of the body, in the matrix of the "Divina Commedia." In this self-perpetuation he interpreted his own time as no modern genius can hope to do- and this is the achievement of personality at its highest. That he might succeed, he was disciplined by controversy, war, grief, exile, until the scales fell from his eyes, and he saw, within the glory of his Church's exaltation, the vice, tyranny, superstition, of that Church at that time, of his people, of his native state. His heart was strengthened for judgment, his manhood for hate, and his vision was set heavenward for an ideal. His epic, then, while dramatically creative, is at the apex of subjective poetry, doubly so from its expression of both the man and the time; hence our chief example of the mixed type- that which is compounded of egoism and inventive imagination. Its throes are those of a transition from absolute art to the sympathetic method of the new day.

Dante could effect this only by a symbolism combining the supreme emblems of pagan and Christian schools.

In his allegory of Hell, Purgatory, and, above all, of Paradise, he is the most profound and aspiring of ethical teachers. The feebler handling of symbolism, for art's sake and beauty's, and with an affectation of the virtues, is seen in