Apart from the ruined castle--destroyed by fire in 1811, according to one story by Italian soldiers, tired of carrying wood and water up the hill!--which is chiefly impressive for its size and for its four-square mass only broken by square towers at each angle, the glimpse of the town which we get from the river is in no way specially attractive. There are some places that can best be seen as it were in a picturesque summary from a point of vantage, places that we remember as “views,” but the ancient capital of Hungary is not one of them. It is necessary to have wandered about its narrow and tortuous streets, to have gone into by-ways that are but flights of steps, affording peeps into quaint old houses on one side, and views over roofs on the other, to have visited some of the old buildings, to have become impressed with the grand panorama from the castle hill, to have wandered about the hilly suburbs, the gardens, orchards, and vineyards, and above all, perhaps, to have made one of the lively crowd on market day in the long and irregular Markt Platz--all this is necessary to awaken that pleasant feeling which makes us remember a place with a lively desire of going there again. If Pozsony (Pressburg) has lost something of its dignity since Budapest became the capital of the kingdom, it has a splendid past--and that it is not content to dream about that past, but has taken on modern activity, is shown by the number of factories established in its neighbourhood. It is, however, justly proud of its history. Twice has it been the means of establishing the Habsburg dynasty on the Austrian throne, though, as Godkin puts it in his “History of Hungary,” “it was the eagle lending his plume to wing the arrow that was to drink his own life-blood.” [Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL, POZSONY] The Franciscan church--in the centre of the old town, near the Rathaus--was built in 1272 by Kún Ladislas IV. in memory of the fact that it had been his aid which, four years earlier, had enabled Rudolph of Habsburg to defeat Ottokar of Bohemia at the Battle of Marchfeld; so that Hungary had its share in founding the dynasty. Then in 1741, when things seemed to have come to a bad pass with the Empress Maria Theresa, with enemies threatening on all sides, she boldly appealed to the well-known loyalty of the Hungarians, and summoned the Diet to meet her at the capital. The response was immediate, and the meeting which was at once convened, took place on 11 September, in the Castle of Pozsony (Pressburg).