In our opinion Gregory Csiky (born 1842, died recently) was the strongest dramatic talent amongst the modern dramatists in Hungary. He is what people are pleased to call a “realist;” that is, his shafts are sunk into the dramatic mines of the society in the midst of which he lives. His strong satire and broad humour, his finely-chiselled language and the bold and true way of his dramatization raise him to the level of the best of contemporary dramatists in any country. In his “The Proletarians” (“_A Proletárok_”) he has seized on a large class of _déclassés_ in Hungary, who by the precipitated legislative reforms after 1867 were deprived of their previous means of living, and so turned to parasitic methods of eking out an existence. That class is brought to dramatic life full of humorous, sad, and striking phenomena. There is not in this drama, any more than in Csiky’s other dramas (“Bubbles” [“_Buborékok_”], “Two Loves” [“_Két szerelem_”], “The Timid” [“_A szégyenlős_”], “Athalia,” etc.) the slightest trace of that morbid psychologism which has made the fortune of Ibsen. It is all sound, fresh, penetrating and vibrating with true dramatic life. Last, not least, there is much beauty of form and construction. Csiky, who has published very valuable translations of Sophocles and Plautus, is thoroughly imbued with the classic sense of form and with the real vocation of the drama as the art-work showing the emotional and mental movements of _social_ types, and not of some pathologic excrescence of society. In other words, he does not muddle up, as Ibsen does, the novel with the drama. Amongst the writers of “folk-dramas,” Edward Tóth (1844-1876), occupies a very high place. His “The Village Scamp” (“_A falu rossza_”) tells the touching story of a young peasant who, disappointed in love, loses all moral backbone and is finally saved by the fidelity of a woman. The drama is full of scenes taken from Hungarian peasant life, which is far more dramatic than peasant life in Germany. The Hungarians have, till quite recently, never had a Berthold Auerbach, or a novelist taking the subject of his novels from peasant life. They have dramatists of peasant life instead; and a short comparison with the peasant dramas written by Austrians, such as those of Anzengruber, will show the decided superiority of the Hungarians. One strong element in the folk-dramas of Tóth and of Francis Csepreghy (1842-1880, author of “The Yellow Colt” [“_A sárga csikó_”], “The Red Purse” [“_Piros bugyelláris_”]), is the folk-poems and folk-songs, sung and danced. By this incidental element of tone and verse, which, as a sort of inarticulate commentary on the dramatic scenes does duty for the philosophic reflections of the non-peasant drama, the hearer is brought into intimate touch with the very innermost pulsation of the life of the “folk.” CHAPTER XXX.