HUNGARY WATER.

319

bias to credulity and superstition; therefore what he saysmay not be entitled to much credit: but he gives a recipeagainst the gout in the feet and hands, much the same asthat of the Hungarian Queen, and says he found it at thebeginning of a breviary, which had belonged to St. Elizabeth,Queen of Hungary , in her own hand-writing. This breviarywas in the possession of Francis Podacather, a noblemanfrom Cyprus , to whose ancestors it had been given as a me-morial by the Queen herself.

It is easily seen that Prevot mistook this St. Elizabethfor Elizabeth, the daughter of King Andrew II . who wasnever Queen of Hungary , but died wife of a landgrave ofThuringia, in 1235. As Hungarian writers inform us, thatthe wife of King Charles Robert possessed two breviaries,which she disposed of by will, one to her daughter-in-law, andthe other to one Clara von Pukur; and after her death, tobe the property of a certain monastery at Buda ; it is,therefore, not very questionable, but one of these booksmight have come into the hands of PodacatJier’s family.

It has been rationally conjectured, that this Princess wasextremely vain, as well as extremely foolish, to believe her-self, and wish to impress posterity with the same weak-ness, that she, w’hen beyond the grand climacteric, became sosprightly, young, and beautiful, that a royal widower wasenamoured of her: this king and widower has been soughtfor, but in vain. The proposal for a matrimonial union musthave occurred about 1370. But Casimir III . brother ofthe Hungarian Elizabeth, reigned in Poland till that year,and was succeeded by her son Louis, who died in 1382,after which the throne remained vacant for three years. 4

It must also appear strange, that tlife name of aqua viltr,and the practice of distillation from aromatic herbs, shouldbe so well known in Hungary , as in the early part of thefourteenth century : though the contrary cannot be proved,the known ignorance of the most enlightened countriesstrongly militates against it. Besides, it is singular thatHungary water should not have been noticed by botanists,in the beginning of the seventeenth century, whilst speakingof the properties of this herb and other simples. It, how r -ever, must be confessed, that as early as in the sixteenthcentury, Zapata, an Italian physician, taught the method ofpreparing spirit of rosemary , s and he says it was imperfectly

* Hubner’s Gencalogisclie tabelleu, L p. 95.

5 Recipe igitur mustura bonuni, scilicet lixivium sponte deflucus, antequamcaicentur uvae; cui vast commisso, adde statira cymatuiu et foliorum rorismarmi