These reflections are suggested by a consideration of the works of Francis Kölcsey (1790-1838), a really great orator and a good poet. Born in the county of Bihar, where he spent the best part of his short life, he employed his magnificent powers of oratory chiefly in inculcating in the Hungarians of his time the lesson of patriotism. There can be no doubt that his speeches, his lofty “_Paraenesis_,” and some of his critical work are written in that gorgeously laborious style which has made the fame of Bossuet in France and Gibbon in England. His poems breathe a mild melancholy that gives them a sombre tint of peculiar beauty. Yet, on the whole, he never oversteps the narrow limits of Magyar life as then existent; and what appeals to men of all countries and all nations found but a feeble rhetorical echo in his writings. No young Hungarian can read his works without deep emotion. In maturer years, however, he finds that Kölcsey’s works belong to those that one gladly remembers to have read once, without desiring to read them again. The growth of Hungarian Literature from 1772 to 1825 was, compared to that of England from 1570 to 1620; of Germany from 1760 to 1805; or of France from 1630 to 1675, a slow one. Many of the Hungarian writers of that period were endowed with gifts of no common calibre; and some of them, such as Kazinczy, Kisfaludy, Csokonai, Berzsenyi, Kölcsey, can certainly not be denied the distinction of genius. Yet with all their efforts, individual or collective, they did not quicken the step of literary progress very considerably. This was owing to the fact, that Hungary had as yet no literary centres, such as England possessed in London; France in Paris; and Germany in Berlin, Leipsic or Weimar. Nearly all the poets and other writers so far mentioned lived in small towns scattered over the country, and, from the lack of good communications, were practically isolated from one another. Kazinczy lived in the county of Zemplén; Kölcsey in the county of Bihar; Kisfaludy, Berzsenyi, Ádám Horváth in the cis-Danubian counties. There were, it is true, some literary centres in Pesth; such as the house of the able folk-poet Vitkovics. But they were few, and Pesth was, as yet, not a great capital. Literature needs local concentration of high-strung people. Country life gives the aptitude for poetic work; intense urban life alone ripens that aptitude into creative talent. Virgil at Mantua, or Cicero at Arpinum would have remained sterile provincials. The great mental agitation set in motion by the writers in Magyar above mentioned was given additional fuel by a very large number of Hungarians writing in Latin and French. The ideas of the French and German Rationalism (“_Aufklaerung_”) of that time were eagerly seized upon, elaborated and discussed in over five hundred works and pamphlets treating of Religion, Politics, Law and Philosophy. Hungary was thus during that period (1772-1825), instinct