up a winding staircase into a handsome and spacious gallery, and thence into a circular room, which in the time of King Mathias had been a chapel. Out of this chapel you go into another room, in which King Mathias Corvinus had his library, where the ecliptic is painted with the planets, and two astronomers facing each other. Underneath this couplet is written:—
Cum rex Mathias suscepit sceptra Boëmæ
Gentis, erat similis lucida forma poli.”
“When King Mathias took Bohemia’s crown.
This was the form the radiant skies did own.”
Next to the library was the royal chamber, in which the kings of Hungary used to live. It is very handsomely painted, and hung with fine tapestry along the sides, where stands a kind of throne, covered with an awning of handsome carpets, under which the pasha sits and holds his council when he comes to the castle. We then descended below, and ascended again by a wooden staircase into a tower, the dungeons in which are very deep and well secured, and in which, at that time, as the Turks told us, there were as many as seventy Christian captives, who cannot escape from it in any way except by the aid of Divine Providence itself, or by paying an enormous sum of money and ransoming themselves. Round this tower are bastions, which strengthen it exceedingly, and on it stand three cannons on wheels, one of them a piece cast by the Bishop of Gran. We afterwards went to a large palace, in which there was nothing particular to see. Lastly, returning down the Danube, we crossed to the city of
