The financial crisis of 1841, and the money speculations of the old Baron Eötvös, led the family to the brink of ruin. Joseph Eötvös was compelled to live by his pen; anywhere but in England and France, the bread of literature is poverty indeed. In 1842, he married an amiable and accomplished woman; but still he smiled at Mademoiselle le Normand's prophecy. As a peer and as a public writer, he belonged to the extreme opposition; and although his party had the greatest influence in the country, there was no reason to suppose that it would ever be called upon to grasp the reins of government. The movements of the year 1848 changed the aspect of affairs and the position of parties. A cabinet was formed under the auspices of the Count Batthyany; and Joseph Baron Eötvös was one of the members of that cabinet. In the month of August the political horizon of Hungary became clouded: Jellachich, the Ban of Croatia, prepared to invade our country. The duplicity of the Vienna Cabinet became daily more manifest. The landsturm assembled in Pesth. The Count Lamberg fell a victim to the unbridled passions of the people. The Croatians advanced almost to the very gates of Buda. Le Normand's prophecy came home to Baron Eötvös's mind, and scared him to Vienna. But he had scarcely reached the Austrian capital, when the revolution of October broke out. Eötvös fled. He hastened to Munich, and remained in voluntary exile, without taking any active interest in the fate of his country and the wayward fortunes of his friends. His career as a statesman is ended for many years to come. It is to be hoped that his faculties as a writer will survive the blow which crushed his country; and that his countrymen will have many a song and a few more novels from so clever and spirited a pen. It is the pleasing office of fiction to reconcile us to the anxieties and misfortunes of real matter-of-fact life. May my friend succeed in pouring balm into the fresh wounds of the country; and may his works alleviate, though it be but for a moment, the anguish which in this season of sorrows eats into the heart of every Hungarian!
The traveller in the districts on the lower Theiss, however narrow the circle of his peregrinations, may be said to be familiar with the whole of that part of Hungary. Some families boast of the resemblance, not to say the identity, of their members. To distinguish one from another, we must see them long and often. The case of these districts is very much the case of those families; and the traveller, after a few hours' sleep on our sandy roads, has no means of knowing that he has made any progress, unless, indeed, it be by looking at the setting sun, or his jaded horses. Neither the general character nor the details of the country will remind him of his having been subjected to locomotion. As well might the seaman on the Atlantic endeavour to mark his course on the watery plain which surrounds him. A boundless extent of pasturage, now and then diversified by a broken frame over a well, or a few storks that promenade round a half dried up swamp; bad fields, whose crops of kukuruz and wheat are protected by God only, and by that degree of bodily fatigue to which even a thief is exposed;--perhaps a lonely hut, with a couple of long-haired wolf-dogs, reminding you of the sacredness of property; and the ricks of stale hay and straw, left from the harvest of last year, impressing you with the idea that their owners must either have an excess of hay, or a want of cattle:--such were the sights upon which you closed your eyes, and such, indeed, are the sights which you behold on awaking. The very steeples, which, before you fell asleep, were visible on the far plain, seem to have gone along with you; for there is as little difference between them, as between the village which you were approaching in the early part of the afternoon and the one to which you are now drawing near. The low banks of the Theiss, too, are the same; our own yellow Theiss is not only the best citizen of our country,--for it spends its substance at home,--but it is also the luckiest river in the world, since nobody ever interferes with it. The Theiss is, in fact, the only river in Europe of which it may be said that it is exactly such as God has made it.