JÓKAI, MAURUS (1825-1904), Hungarian novelist, was born at Rév-Komárom on the 19th of February 1825. His father, Joseph, was a member of the Asva branch of the ancient Jókay family; his mother was a scion of the noble Pulays. The lad was timid and delicate, and therefore educated at home till his tenth year, when he was sent to Pressburg, subsequently completing his education at the Calvinist college at Pápá, where he first met Petöfi, Alexander Kozma, and several other brilliant young men who subsequently became famous. His family had meant him to follow the law, his father's profession, and accordingly the youth, always singularly assiduous, plodded conscientiously through the usual curriculum at Kecskemet and Pest, and as a full-blown advocate actually succeeded in winning his first case. But the drudgery of a lawyer's office was uncongenial to the ardently poetical youth, and, encouraged by the encomiums pronounced by the Hungarian Academy upon his first play, _Zsidó fiu_ ("The Jew Boy"), he flitted, when barely twenty, to Pest in 1845 with a MS. romance in his pocket; he was introduced by Petöfi to the literary notabilities of the Hungarian capital, and the same year his first notable romance _Hétköznapok_ ("Working Days"), appeared, first in the columns of the _Pesti Dievatlap_, and subsequently, in 1846, in book form. _Hétköznapok_, despite its manifest crudities and extravagances, was instantly recognized by all the leading critics as a work of original genius, and in the following year Jókai was appointed the editor of _Életképek_, the leading Hungarian literary journal, and gathered round him all the rising talent of the country. On the outbreak of the revolution of 1848 the young editor enthusiastically adopted the national cause, and served it with both pen and sword. Now, as ever, he was a moderate Liberal, setting his face steadily against all excesses; but, carried away by the Hungarian triumphs of April and May 1849, he supported Kossuth's fatal blunder of deposing the Hapsburg dynasty, and though, after the war was over, his life was saved by an ingenious stratagem of his wife, the great tragic actress, Roza Benke Laborfalvi, whom he had married on the 29th of August 1848, he lived for the next fourteen years the life of a political suspect. Yet this was perhaps the most glorious period of his existence, for during it he devoted himself to the rehabilitation of the proscribed and humiliated Magyar language, composing in it no fewer than thirty great romances, besides innumerable volumes of tales, essays, criticisms and facetiæ. This was the period of such masterpieces as _Erdély Arany Kord_ ("The Golden Age of Transylvania"), with its sequel _Törökvilág Magyarországon_ ("The Turks in Hungary"), _Egy Magyar Nábob_ ("A Hungarian Nabob"), _Karpáthy Zoltán, Janicsárok végnapjai_ ("The Last Days of the Janissaries"), _Szomorú napok_ ("Sad Days"). On the re-establishment of the Hungarian constitution by the Composition of