1772-1825. 1772-1825. After a period of decadence, lasting for over sixty years, Hungarian Literature was again brought to a state of revival and progress, which has gone on almost uninterruptedly to the present day. This revival is part of an immense revolution which swept over most countries of continental Europe in the second half of the last century. The most conspicuous and best known event of this Modern Renascence is the series of terrific upheavals and wars commonly called the French Revolution. It is, however, quite evident that the French Revolution was only the politic aspect of a vast movement, which in many countries outside France assumed the garb of intellectual revolutions. Thus the mental achievements that, in their totality, are called the “classical period” of German literature (1750-1805) are in the domain of Thought and Sentiment, a revolution no less colossal and far-reaching than were the ever-memorable proceedings of the French _assemblées_, or the bloody epics of the Revolutionary campaigns. Both were gigantic onslaughts against the _Ancien Régime_ in institutions, manners, thought and sentiment. Accordingly, the course of both revolutions was—making due allowance for externals—essentially the same. As the French Revolution landed in, or rather was brought to its final consummation in the titanic and all-embracing personality of Napoleon, so German literature met its final trysting-place and culmination in the orchestral mind of Goethe. The minor nations of Europe were seized by the same Revolution, if in a manner considerably less intense. The very aggressiveness of the French Revolution, its encroachments on the territories of Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Austria, prevented those minor nations from enacting their Revolution at once in its intellectual and political aspects. While fighting the French, they were all engaged in following them on the lines of the Revolution, first (1790-1830) for intellectual freedom; and then, after the defeat of the French armies (1830-1848), for the very political ideals that the French had been the first to proclaim. For, this was the immense advantage of the French over the other nations on the continent: they had brought their intellectual revolution through men like Turgot, d’Alembert, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, etc., to maturity, before they started for their crusade of politic liberty; whereas the other nations were a generation or two behind-hand, and still in the throes of their intellectual renascence.