This is not the place for a laborious inquiry into the causes of that immense Revolution which has, towards the end of the last, and in the first five decades of the present century, completely altered the face of European civilization. It is nevertheless necessary to give some account of such causes as were instrumental in ripening the intellectual aspect of that Revolution in Hungary. Among the leading causes was a structural change in the population of Hungary on the one hand, and the reaction against the provocative and anti-national measures of the Habsburgs on the other. Up to the sixties of the last century, the population of Hungary consisted practically of (1) a rural population, comprising both magnates, noblemen and peasants; and (2) a small urban population, comprising largely foreign or Germanized craftsmen and tradespeople. Under such circumstances, literature, which is pre-eminently an urban growth, could not develop. For, not only was the urban population too small and too much immersed in material pursuits, but the only intellectual class, viz., the aristocracy, was living in the country, that is, in an atmosphere unfavourable to continuous literary efforts. By the end of the sixties, however, the structural change, above indicated, took place. Owing to a series of measures issued by Maria Theresa and Joseph II., the rural population of Hungary was liberated from its most odious fetters. Bondage, and a sort of serfdom (_jobbágyság_), with all its concomitant evils were almost abolished. Numerous rural families left their obscure abodes, repaired to the towns, and urban life, for the first time in Hungarian history, was raised above the low level on which it had been vegetating for centuries. With the increase of urban population came an increase of wealth and comfort; a greater activity in commerce, both mercantile and social. Many a gifted Hungarian, who would have previously spent his days in the obscurity of his county, now willingly lived in one of the rising towns. With an accelerated speed of work came a more rapid appreciation of talent, and a greater number of authors. The influx of the rural population to the town facilitated that mutual action and reaction between Nature and Man, which, in one form or other, is the main spring of literature. In England, too, the great period of Shakespeare was preceded by a similar structural change in the population. The dissolution of the monasteries and the numerous enclosures of commons, depriving as they did, hundreds of thousands of rural people of their means of livelihood, drove them into the towns, which rapidly ozonified that atmosphere of great intellectual stir, without which no great writers are possible. In Germany, too, the period of Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe was preceded by a new influx of the rural population into the towns devastated by the thirty years’ war. Nor can it be doubted that Italy, in possession of highly-organized and rich