Of a style and tone quite different from the preceding dramas is the “dramatic poem,” as the author calls it, entitled “The Tragedy of Man,” by Emericus Madách (1829-1864). In that great poem there is revealed all the sombreness of profound melancholy, wailing over the bootless struggle of Man since the unlucky moment of his creation. As the reader may have noticed in the course of the present work, the Hungarians, as a nation, are strongly inclined to pathos; just as the English are to satire and the French to irony. In the youthful members of the Magyar nation that bent is at times so strong as to dominate all the other modes and faculties of the soul. Hence the astounding wealth of grave Largos in Hungarian music, and the melancholy and despondent tone in many a great work of Hungarian poetry. Few poems can compare in unaffected sadness and thus twice saddening effect with Arany’s “_Epilogus_.” Madách’s “Tragedy of Man” (“_Az ember tragédiája_”) is, as it were, the funeral march of humanity. It would be utterly wrong to compare it to Goethe’s “Faust.” Although there is a general similarity in the drift of the two works, yet the poem of the luckless and suffering county official of an obscure Hungarian province is essentially different from the drama of the Jupiter of German literature. Madách’s poem is, reduced to its skeleton, a philosophy of History. He takes us from the hour when Adam and Eve were innocently walking in the Garden of Eden, to the times of the Egyptian Pharaohs; then to the Athens of Miltiades; to sinking Rome; to the adventurous period of the Crusaders; into the study of the astronomer Kepler in the seventeenth century; thence into the horrors of the French Revolution; into greed-eaten and commerce-ridden modern London; nay, into the ultra-socialist state of the future, in which there will be no family, no nation, and no individuality amongst the countless individuals; and where the ideas of the preceding ages, such as Religion, Art, Literature, will, by means of scientific formulæ, be shown up in all their absurdity; still further, the poet shows the future of the earth, when ice will cover the whole of its surface, and Europeans and other human beings will be reduced to the state of a degraded brute dragging on the misery of existence in some cave. In all these scenes, Adam, Eve and the arch-fiend (Lucifer) are the chief and constantly recurring _personæ dramatis_. In fact, all these scenes are meant to be prophetic dreams of Adam, which Lucifer causes him to have in order to disgust him with humanity in advance, and so, by driving him to suicide, to discontinue humanity. In paradise, Adam learns and teaches the lesson of man’s incapability of enduring bliss; in Egypt, Adam, as Pharaoh, experiences the bottomless wretchedness of tyranny, where “millions live for the sake of one;” in Athens he is made to shudder at the contemptible fickleness of man when part of a crowd; in sinking Rome he stands aghast at the