These three writers were as the forerunners of literary individualities of a much higher type. The first of them was Joseph Kármán (1769-1795). He too spent some time in Vienna, where then centred the political and social life of a large portion of Europe. Like so many more Hungarians, he burst into enthusiasm for his country by staying and living amongst a foreign people who, in the nobler traits of character, were decidedly inferior to the Magyars, and who yet were considered to be their rulers. The people of Austria, and especially the Viennese, are utterly different from the Hungarians. Their love of the burlesque, of the grotesquely funny, of the clownish, stood out then, as it still largely does, in sharp contrast to the dignified gravity of the Magyars. To be considered as subject to people so very much less adapted for the functions of government than themselves, was at all times galling to the Hungarians; and perhaps never more so, than in the nineties of the last century, when a mighty wave of opposition to the Habsburgs was sweeping over Hungary. Kármán’s was a most sensitive soul. He fully realized that to render Hungarian Literature more perfect and independent was first of all a great political deed. He keenly felt, that Hungary, unless emancipated intellectually, must fall a victim to the then immense ascendancy of Austria. Every good poem, every good novel, written by a Hungarian in the language of his country, was then of more service to Hungary than all the proceedings at the national assemblies. Kármán, despite his extreme youth, at once set to work. He proclaimed that Pesth ought to be the literary centre of Hungary. He started a quarterly (“_Urania_”), and hastened to write his “_Memoirs of Fanny_” (“_Fanni hagyományai_”). The latter is a novel in the form of letters and leaves from a diary. Fanny, the heroine, loves with all the inconsiderate passion of a young girl, a young man, whom she is not allowed to marry. She dies of a broken heart in the arms of her lover. The plot of the novel is of the simplest. The excessive sentimentality of the heroine, who is, as it were, drowned in the floods of her own feelings, is to our present taste somewhat overdone. With all these shortcomings, however, Kármán has poured over his little story so much of the golden light of fine, unaffected style, and has enriched it with so many touches of the most effective descriptions of scenery, that “_Fanny_” will always rank among the foremost of the literary products of the kind, of which Goethe’s “_Werther_” is the most famous.