The map of Hungary accompanying this book is, we venture to say, the first map published outside Hungary based on the most careful comparison of the original sources. The greatest pains have been taken to ensure absolute accuracy of names of places and of county boundaries, according to the most recent data. EMIL REICH. 17, TAVISTOCK ROAD, W. _June 15th, 1898_. [Illustration: HUNGARY PROPER] HUNGARIAN LITERATURE. CHAPTER I. Of the nations in the south-east of Europe, the Hungarians, or Magyars, are probably the most renowned, and at the same time, the least known. Although their extensive country has now been in their possession and under their rule for over one thousand years, and albeit the historic _rôle_ of the Hungarians, rather than that of Hungary, has been and is one of no common magnitude, in that, without their secular and successful fight against Osman ascendancy, Europe could scarcely have maintained its civilization in the countries east of Munich: yet in spite of all such claims to attention on the part of western nations, Hungary and the Hungarians are still largely unknown in England, France and America. In English-speaking countries no serious attempts have as yet been made either to tell the stirring story of Hungary’s past, or to analyse the rich possibilities of her future. Except single and singular features of Magyar life or natural products, such as the famous “Hungarian” bands of the Tsiganes or gypsies and their “weird” music; Hungarian flour and Hungarian wine; and most of all the figure of Hungary’s greatest political orator, Louis Kossúth; except these and a few more curiosities relating to Hungary, the proud nations of the west of Europe do not, as a rule, take notice of all the rest of the life of a nation of eighteen million persons. The festivities of the Hungarian millennium celebrated the year before last, came to the western world as a surprise. Few Englishmen were prepared to realize the fact that, at a time when their ancestors were still under small princes of mixed blood, and, moreover, constantly exposed to, and finally nearly absorbed by foreign conquerors, the Hungarians had already reared a solid fabric of government on the site on which for now over a thousand years they have withstood the armies, the diplomacy and the alien immigration of the Turks, the Germans and the Slavs. Unconquered by force or disaster, and not denationalized by either the Germans or Slavs around them, the Hungarians have maintained almost intact the language and music they brought with them from the Steppes of Asia; and when in the ripeness of time a Magyar literature was beginning to develop, it proceeded on lines neither German nor Slav, but thoroughly Hungarian.