Had Francis been still on the throne, it is possible that Metternich would have offered further resistance to the popular demands. But Francis had died in 1835, the year before the closing of the Diet. His successor, Ferdinand, though, chiefly from physical causes, too weak to hold his own against Metternich, was a kindly, easy-tempered man, not without a sense that even kings ought to obey the law. But whether Metternich or Ferdinand were to blame in the matter, the concessions of the King were made in a hesitating and grudging manner which took away their grace, and made the defeat more vividly apparent both to victors and spectators. A more popular Chancellor of Hungary, Anton Mailath, was appointed; another member of the same family was made chief justice; and about the same time the Transylvanian Diet was restored. Hoping that he had now conciliated popular feeling, Metternich, in 1839, called together the Diet of Presburg and demanded four million florins and thirty-eight thousand recruits. But the members of the Assembly had been instructed by their constituents to oppose any demands of the Government until Wesselenyi, Kossuth, and the members of a club who had been arrested at the same time, were liberated. And while Deak still led the opposition in the Lower House, Count Louis Batthyanyi came forward as the champion of freedom in the House of Magnates. Finally, the Emperor consented, not only to grant an amnesty to Wesselenyi, Kossuth, and others, but to pass that clause about the peasants' dues which he had vetoed in 1836. The Diet then voted the money, and was dissolved. Thus, while in Italy a new faith was springing up which was to supply a force to the struggles for liberty that they had previously lacked, in Hungary the different, but hardly less effective, power of old traditions of Constitutional freedom was checking Metternich in his full career of tyranny, and forcing him to confess a defeat inflicted, not by foreign diplomatists, but by that very people who had rallied round Maria Theresa in her hour of danger, and who had sternly rejected the advances of Napoleon when he had invited them to separate their cause from that of the House of Austria. FOOTNOTES: