Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI | Page 4

wish. The Hungarian noble
when singing with the gipsies is capable of giving the dark-faced boys
every penny he has. In this manner many a young nobleman has been
ruined, and the gipsies make nothing of it, because they are just like
their masters and "spend easily earned money easily," as the saying
goes. Where there is much music there is much dancing. Every Sunday
afternoon after church the villages are lively with the sound of the
gipsy band, and the young peasant boys and girls dance.
The Slovaks of the north play a kind of bagpipe, which reminds one of
the Scotch ones; but the songs of the Slovak have got very much mixed
with the Hungarian. The Rumanian music is of a distinct type, but the
dances all resemble the Csárdás, with the difference that the quick
figures in the Slav and Rumanian dances are much more grotesque and
verging on acrobatism.

VII
AUSTRIA'S ADRIATIC PORTS
TRIESTE AND POLA[3]
BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN
Trieste stands forth as a rival of Venice, which has, in a low practical
view of things, outstript her. Italian zeal naturally cries for the recovery
of a great city, once part of the old Italian kingdom, and whose speech
is largely, perhaps chiefly, Italian to this day. But, a cry of "Italia
Irredenta," however far it may go, must not go so far as this. Trieste, a
cosmopolitan city on a Slavonic shore, can not be called Italian in the
same sense as the lands and towns so near Verona which yearn to be as
Verona is. Let Trieste be the rival, even the eyesore, of Venice, still
Southern Germany must have a mouth.
We might, indeed, be better pleased to see Trieste a free city, the

southern fellow of Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg; but it must not be
forgotten that the Archduke of Austria and Lord of Trieste reigns at
Trieste by a far better right than that by which he reigns at Cattaro and
Spizza. The present people of Trieste did not choose him, but the
people of Trieste five hundred years back did choose the forefather of
his great-grandmother. Compared with the grounds of which kingdoms,
duchies, counties, and lordships, are commonly held in that
neighborhood, such a claim as this must be allowed to be respectable
indeed.
The great haven of Trieste may almost at pleasure be quoted as either
confirming or contradicting the rule that it is not in the great
commercial cities of Europe that we are to look for the choicest or the
most plentiful remains of antiquity. Sometimes the cities themselves
are of modern foundation; in other cases the cities themselves, as
habitations of men and seats of commerce, are of the hoariest antiquity,
but the remains of their early days have perished through their very
prosperity. Massalia,[4] with her long history, with her double wreath
of freedom, the city which withstood Cæsar and which withstood
Charles of Anjou, is bare of monuments of her early days. She has been
the victim of her abiding good fortune. We can look down from the
height on the Phôkaian harbor; but for actual memorials of the men
who fled from the Persian, of the men who defied the Roman and the
Angevin, we might look as well at Liverpool or at Havre.
Genoa, Venice herself, are hardly real exceptions; they were indeed
commercial cities, but they were ruling cities also, and, as ruling cities,
they reared monuments which could hardly pass away. What are we to
say to the modern rival of Venice, the upstart rebel, one is tempted to
say, against the supremacy of the Hadriatic Queen? Trieste, at the head
of her gulf, with the hills looking down to her haven, with the snowy
mountains which seem to guard the approach from the other side of her
inland sea, with her harbor full of the ships of every nation, her streets
echoing with every tongue, is she to be reckoned as an example of the
rule or an exception to it?
No city at first sight seems more thoroughly modern; old town and new,
wide streets and narrow, we search them in vain for any of those
vestiges of past times which in some cities meet us at every step.
Compare Trieste with Ancona;[5] we miss the arch of Trajan on the

haven; we miss the cupola of Saint Cyriacus soaring in triumph above
the triumphal monument of the heathen. We pass through the stately
streets of the newer town, we thread the steep ascents which lead us to
the older town above, and we nowhere light on any of those little scraps
of ornamental architecture, a window, a doorway, a column, which
meet us at every step in so many of the cities of Italy.
Yet