We must now mention the greatest of all the Hungarian poets of the sixteenth century, whose name we have so far left unnoticed because, by one of the strange freaks of life, the manuscripts of his lyrical poems, on which rests his great fame among Magyar poets, were first discovered only twenty-four years ago (in 1874), and some of them even after that date, and were therefore never largely known to the contemporaries of their author. This poet is Baron Valentin Balassi (1551-1594). He came from a magnate family, and so great were the gifts with which nature had endowed him, that men praised him as a model of heroism, and women worshipped him as the embodiment of chivalrous charm. In the troubles of his time, both political and social, he took more than one part; and he may be considered as at once the Knight Errant and the Parsifal of Hungary in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Highly cultivated and sensitive as he was, he could not but respond to the religious impulses of his time, and so became the author of many a religious poem. On his wanderings, which took him not only over the whole of his own country, but even as far as North Germany and probably also to England, he saw all forms and aspects of life. His lyric sentiments he embodied in the so-called “Flower Songs” (“_Virág-énekek_”), which are full of that _verve_ and sweetness so characteristic of the best lyric poets of Hungary. He also introduced a new form of lyric stanza—the Balassi Stanza—which consists of nine short lines, the end-rhymes of which are the same in the third, sixth, and ninth lines, while the remaining three couples, have each their own rhymes. CHAPTER VII. 1520-1711.