The next in time and merit was the school of the Classicists, or more properly speaking, Latinists. The first four remarkable members of that school were all unfrocked priests. Baróti David Szabó (1739-1819), and Joseph Rajnis (Reinisch) were ex-Jesuits; Nicolas Révai (1750-1807) was a Piarist, and Benedictus Virág (1752(?)-1830) an ex-Paulist. The circumstances of their mental development above indicated led them naturally to an imitation of the Latin poets; and Virág in Hungary, like Ramler in Germany, or Cowley in England, was held to be one of the numerous “Horaces,” in whom the nascent literatures of Europe were happily so rich. In ripe mellowness of formal beauty and musical ring Virág cannot, we are afraid, be said to have seriously challenged the laurels of the friend of Augustus. His _Works_ (_Poétai Munkák_, 1799) are, on the other hand, inspired by a noble glow of patriotism, which might have added some lustre to the poems even of Flaccus. Virág translated Horace into Hungarian, as Baróti had done with the _Aeneid_. The poetical works of the other two ex-priests were of an inferior kind. To the above two schools now was added the third; the national or genuinely Magyar school. The two former laid special stress on purity and perfection of form, both external and internal. In fact, the classicists came near sacrificing everything else to correctness of form. In this they were partly justified, partly supported by the peculiar adaptability of the Hungarian language to the most complicated of classic metres. Hexameters or alcaics are just as natural to Hungarian, as they are to Greek and Latin; and infinitely more so than to any other Indo-German language of Europe. The classicists, and especially the greatest of them, Berzsenyi—see below—were able to handle the most national and intimate subjects in the most foreign of verse-forms, and with perfect ease too. This seemed to go far in convincing many writers, that classical forms were the only ones to adopt, and classical models the only ones to follow. The prosodic wealth of the Hungarian language is, however, not exhausted by its classic metres by far. From time immemorial Hungarian poetry was wedded to Hungarian music, and the latter, with its pointed rhythms and sudden irruptions of cadences, was quite unfitted for the stately calm of antique metres. In German classical music, classical metres, such as the hexameter or the alcaic may be, and have been employed. In Hungarian music they are out of place altogether. Here, then, was the inner justification of the “Magyar” school. Its members strongly and rightly felt, that in the cult of antique prosody the classicists had overstepped the bounds; that Hungarian poetry needed forms and moulds other than those of Virgil or Horace; and that the short cross-rhymed stanza was to Hungarian Literature, what the violin and the “_czimbalom_” (dulcimer) were to Hungarian music. It is impossible to play Hungarian music on the organ.