I talk nothing
but politics and business. There is not a man with whom I could speak
in the way that we did on Sundays at your villa. I am of course much
with old Deak. I often dine with him. I know all his anecdotes and
jokes by heart. He likes it, if I visit him; but our conversation
remains within the narrow limits of party politics and the topics of
the day. Sometimes I spend an evening with Baron Eotvoes, the Minister
of Public Instruction, my old friend; and there only we get both
warm in remembering the days of our youth, and building _chateaux
en Espagne_ for the future of the country. Eotvoes has appointed me
Director of the National Museum, which contains a library of 180,000
volumes, mostly Hungarian; a very indifferent picture gallery, with
a few good pictures and plenty of rubbish; a poor collection of
antiquities; splendid mediaeval goldsmith work; arms, coins, and some
miserable statues; a good collection of stuffed birds; an excellent
one of butterflies; a celebrated one of beetles, and good specimens
for geology and mineralogy. But all this collection is badly, if at
all, catalogued; badly arranged; and until now we have in a great
palace an appropriation of only 1,200_l._ a year. I shall have much to
do there--as much as any minister in his office, if politics leave me
the necessary time for it.
[Then follows a quantity of details about the party politics of the
day.
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