Liszt was born in 1811 at Raiding in Hungary. His father was a steward of the Esterhazy estates and had himself considerable musical talent. Young Liszt played in public at the age of nine, and attracted so much attention that his musical education in Vienna was paid for by patrons. He soon visited France and England and Switzerland, and everywhere his playing was well received. When he was only sixteen his father died. It was the young man’s great admiration for the violinist Paganini which fired him with the ambition to do for the piano what Paganini had done for the violin. At the age of twenty-four he formed a connection with Mme la Comtesse d’Agoult, friend of George Sand, and herself a literary woman, who wrote under the pseudonym of Daniel Stern. Of the three children resulting from this association, one became the wife of Von Bülow and afterwards married Richard Wagner. Liszt is equally well known as a performer, conductor, and composer, but in the latter rôle he takes a lower place than the Austrian musicians of the Mighty Quartette. As will be seen by comparison of dates, he was contemporary with Beethoven and Schubert. Liszt died in 1886, leaving behind him an immense mass of work, songs, cantatas, oratorios, pianoforte pieces, etc., which are of unequal merit. The Opera House at Budapest has been mentioned. There are also the concerts of the Philharmonic Society every second week from November to March. There are numbers of theatres, besides the National one, and the collective life of the people is gay and bright. The town is particularly rich in libraries, chief among them is that in the Hungarian National Museum, already mentioned. This contains over a million and a quarter volumes, and among them many Corvin codexes from the library of King Matthias Corvinus, which was rifled by the Turks and the contents carried away to Constantinople. It is to the credit of Turkey that a good many have been restored as a graceful act of courtesy to the nation from time to time. The University library, a splendid building in Franciscan Square, owns 300,000 volumes, and the library of the Academy of Sciences, 200,000. The University has departments for theology, law, political science, medicine, and philosophy. On the Embankment, which forms a favourite promenade, is a statue of Petöfi, the Hungarian poet best known to the world at large. Everywhere in Hungary excellent groups and figures of statuary are to be met with, many of them full of spirit and life, and none so bad as many constantly found in England. The Houses of Parliament include the two chambers and each is in horseshoe shape.