During the eighteenth century and up to 1815, the great and scarcely interrupted wars of the Habsburgs enlisted all the powers of Hungary. In 1741 the Magyars, and they alone, saved Austria from what seemed to be inevitable dismemberment. From that date onward to the campaign of 1788 the History of Hungary is but a chapter in that of Austria. Towards that latter date the wave of Nationalism started in France had reached Hungary. Like the Belgians and the Czechs (Bohemians), the Hungarians too began to revolt from the anti-nationalist and _egalitarian_ autocracy of Emperor Joseph II., one of the characteristic geniuses of the last century, who was exceedingly enlightened on everything else but his own business. The old Magyar institutions, and weightiest amongst them, the Magyar language was, by the Hungarian diet, alas! not by the Hungarian people, decreed to be the public language of the country. Resistance to Joseph’s “reforms” became so serious, as to prevail upon the dying monarch to revoke them, 1790; and under his successor, Leopold II., 1790-1792, who was of a less aggressive temper, Hungarian nationality seemed to approach its revival. This was, however, not to be. The French Revolution, although essentially a nationalist movement, forwarded in Europe outside France, for nearly two generations after its rise, none but the cause of the monarchs. The Hungarians, who gave Austria many of her best generals, and fought in nearly all the battles of the Revolutionary Wars from 1792 to 1815, were in the end shorn of all their hopes and expectations by the successful fop who directed Austria’s policy from 1809 to 1848. Prince Metternich had not the faintest conception of the rights or wants of the Hungarians; and having brought to fall, as he thought he did, the French Revolution and its personification, Napoleon Buonaparte, he could not but think that a small nation, as the Hungarians, would speedily and lastingly yield to high-handed police regulations, to gagging the public conscience, and to unmanning the press. The year 1848 witnessed the final victory of the French Revolution all over Europe. Hungary, foremost amongst the countries where oppressed nations were demolishing the bulwarks of tyranny, freed herself from the yoke of Austrian ministers. The Austrian armies were driven out of Hungary; the Habsburgs were declared to have forfeited the crown of St. Stephen; and but for the help of Russia, the Austrian monarchs would have been deprived of more than one half of their empire. When a now nameless Hungarian general surrendered to the Russians at Világos (1849), Hungary was bodily incorporated with the Austrian Empire, and Czech and Austrian officials were sent down to germanize and denationalize Hungary. In 1860 the reaction set in. The nation, offering a passive resistance of a most formidable character, brought the Vienna Cabinet to its senses; and when, at Königsgrätz (July, 1866), the