Hungarian Literature was fortunate enough to find one of those initiators and suggestive stimulators during the period of its great revival, in the person of Francis Kazinczy (1759-1831). His work has frequently been compared to that of Lessing. No greater injustice could be done to Kazinczy. To compare him to the author of “_Laokoon_,” “_Emilia Galotti_,” and “_Anti-Goetze_,” is to render him much smaller than he really was. Without being a Lessing by far, he had a very considerable and beneficial influence on Hungarian writers, many of them greater than he. He was the son of a well-to-do gentleman of the county of Bihar, which has a population of both Magyars and Roumanians, and does not therefore belong to the counties where the purely Magyar spirit is permeating all the phases of life. To this circumstance, no less than to his education, must be ascribed Kazinczy’s little sympathy with the strongly Magyar and nationalist aspirations of the Debreczen school. His youth he spent chiefly in North Hungary, where the study of German literature was then rife in the better circles of society. Having acquired a competent knowledge of German, French and English, he poured forth, since 1791, numerous, most carefully composed translations from Shakespeare (_Hamlet_), Goethe, Molière, Klopstock, Herder, Lessing, etc. From 1794 to 1801 he was kept in various state prisons, for having been, as was alleged, implicated in the conspiracy of Martinovics. This terrible experience left no particular traces either on his mind or on his character. Subsequently, as previously, nay during his imprisonment, he was busy with the elaboration of essays, critical, historical, or novelistic, all of which had two distinct aims: first—to reform the Hungarian literary language, by the introduction of new words and especially new idioms; secondly, to reform Hungarian Literature by modelling it after the standard of Greek masterpieces. Both lines of reform were in the right direction. The Hungarian language was in Kazinczy’s youth still far from developed. Its vocabulary was limited mostly to the designation of things material, and quite fallow for the production of terms expressing things abstract or æsthetic. It resembled a country in which there is abundant currency in the shape of small coin; it lacked gold coins and bank-notes of great value. Yet like Hungary itself, its language was replete with gold-mines. In the rich and racy vocabulary of the common people there was both overt material and abundant hints for material hidden under the surface. Kazinczy, instead of taking these hints—instead of coining his new terms and idioms from the language of the common people, as he ought to have done, preferred to coin them according to standards taken from the western languages of Europe. In this he was grievously mistaken. There are unfortunately very few, if any, true dialects of the Hungarian language. This, the greatest