In comparing Hungarian Literature with the literature of the Germans, French or English, we cannot but recognize, for the reasons just mentioned, that the splendour and comprehensiveness of the Literature of those nations cannot be found in that of the Magyars. At the same time we make bold to point out an advantage which Hungarian Literature has over the literature of many another nation, if not in the past, certainly in the future. This advantage is in the Hungarian language. The Magyars have a language of their own. It is not a borrowed language; not one taken from another nation, in whose use it had been for centuries. The Americans, both in North and South America, although they are in nearly everything else the counterparts of their European parent-nations, have yet preserved the idioms of the latter. In politics, social constitution, individual temper, and attitude of mind, the North and South Americans are—a long stay in that continent has convinced us of that—utterly different from either the English or the Spanish. The Americans proper have indeed built up, or developed into a nation of their own. For good or for bad, they have a distinct and novel national personality. One thing excepted; that one thing, however, is a vital element in the intellectual activity of a nation. We mean, of course, Language. The Americans have moulded and coloured all the old elements of their nationality into organs with a tone and hue of their own. Language alone they have, with slight differences, taken over and preserved in the very form and woof in which the English and Spanish had left it in the old colonies. Hence there is between the Americans, as a new nation, and their language, as an old and foreign idiom, a discordance and discrepancy that no genius can entirely remove. The words of a language are mostly gentry of olden descent. Between them there are associations and tacit understandings ill-fitted for an environment essentially different from their original cast. This discrepancy has, there can be little doubt, exercised a baneful influence on the literature of the American nations. It has baulked them of the higher achievements, and neither in the literature of North America nor in that of South America can we meet with literary masterworks of the first rank. Between the poets and writers of those nations and the languages they are using there is much of that antagonism which has always been found to exist between the cleverest of Neo-Latin poets and the language of Rome. Latin is a dead language; and all the intellectual atmosphere and soil that nurtured and developed it have long since ceased to stimulate. Accordingly, the Politiani and Sadoleti, the Sannazari and Buchanani, and all others who in modern times have tried to revive Latin literature have entirely failed. As with individuals so it is with nations. The Belgians, or the Swiss in Europe are, like the Americans,