During the seventeenth century Hungary was oppressed by two evils of apparently antagonistic character; either of which, however, was to have the same fatal effect on Hungarian Literature. On the one hand, nearly two-thirds of Hungary proper, as apart from Transylvania, was under Turkish rule; on the other, the Habsburgs, then at their apogee, waged a relentless war against the liberties and independence of the Hungarians both in non-Turkish Hungary and in Transylvania. In the latter country, the Bocskays, Bethlens, and Rákóczys had in succession contrived to establish a Hungarian principate which, although acknowledging Turkish ascendancy, yet retained many of the rights of sovereignty. These two sets of circumstances were in themselves hurtful to the development of anything relating to Hungarian nationality, and most of all to Hungarian Literature. The counties under Turkish rule could not, by the very nature of the oppression under which they smarted, produce any literary movement at all. The counties under Austrian rule were held in bondage both political and intellectual, which stifled all attempts at a national literature. The sages have as yet not been able to prove, that a republican government must of necessity be beneficial to the material and political welfare of a nation. As to the intellectual progress of a nation, on the other hand, Liberty is generally taken to be an indispensable condition. Literature is possible only where there is at least a republic of minds. The Austrian government took good precautions to render the rise of such a republic in Hungary an impossibility. All the higher and middle schools in Austrian Hungary were, during the seventeenth century, in the hands of the Jesuits. The order of Jesus has not, as is well known, prevented a very great number of its members and pupils from rising to eminence in Theology and in Science. It could not, owing to its cosmopolitan and anti-national constitution, further movements of national literature. Quite apart from the debatable nature of its moral and political teachings, it retarded or stopped all such movements by employing in its schools the Latin language as the vehicle of instruction. At Nagyszombat (in 1635); at Kassa (in 1657); at Buda (in 1687), the Jesuits founded, or taught in, universities, where lectures on all branches of knowledge were delivered in the mongrel language of the mediæval Scholastics, which has always had a baneful influence both on knowledge and its students. In the Protestant schools, the number of which exceeded seven hundred and fifty, the same radically false system was observed. The consequence was, that the vast majority of Hungarians had never received a living knowledge of either the history of Man or of Nature, and could accordingly turn their dead intellectual capital to no account. The only Hungarians whose mental acquirements had sufficient vitality to serve as stimulants to literary production of a higher type