Amidst the din and excitement of the endless wars in Hungary, both civil and foreign, during the seventeenth century, the agitated mind of the common people vented itself in numerous ditties, skits and lampoons, which, after the name of one of the national parties, have been called _Kurucz-poetry_. It consists almost exclusively of largely unprinted little poems, mostly political, and depicts the agonies and torments of the patriots. Some of them are good and true in tone, and even powerful in the expression of hatred and satire. The one ever-memorable folk-poem of that time, however, was not written in words. The profound passions aroused by the last great revolution under the romantic Francis Rákóczy II., towards the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, were incarnated in inimitable fashion in the “_Rákóczy march_,” the most fanaticising of all war-marches. Whoever actually composed it (tradition ascribes it to a Hungarian gipsy-woman by the name of Panna Czinka), that march spells a whole period of Hungarian history, just as Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ spells a whole period of English life. The Magyar nation was at the end of the seventeenth century far too unpractised in literary architecture to rear its pangs and longings into a dome of words. It was, however, then as now sufficiently imbued with the power of musical creation, to embody its woes in the fiery rhythms of the most heroic of martial songs. CHAPTER IX. 1520-1711. During the period in question very little was done for historic and scientific studies. John Cséri de Apáca (1625-1660), an enthusiastic student and patriot, published a small Hungarian “_Encyclopedia_” (1655), in which the elements of knowledge, both philologic, natural and mathematical are given in a simple and clear manner. Francis Páriz-Pápai published a much used dictionary of the Hungarian and Latin languages (1708). The nine books of the chronicle of John Szalárdi, who died 1666 (“_Siralmas Krónika_”), form the first attempt at historiography in the Hungarian language. Some of the leading men of that age left memoirs; and grammarians were also not wanting. The great philosophic wave, sweeping over Europe in the seventeenth century (Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Pierre Bayle), left scarcely any traces in Hungarian Literature, except in Cséri’s Encyclopedia, where Cartesianism is not quite absent. CHAPTER X. 1711-1772.