At once a few of them became the “standard” novelists. Nobody wanted to hear of any other. By this means the rise of other, perhaps greater novelists, was retarded, if not altogether foreclosed; and the “standard” man, eagerly seizing on the great favour bestowed upon him, poured forth scores of novels, irrespective of the higher demands of Art. The consequence was that he deteriorated. For one good novel he gave ten bad ones. Having a sort of literary monopoly, he did not heed adverse criticism. The public, on the other hand, did not care to learn of a new novelist, and, as actually happened in Hungary, almost entirely neglected a real genius for no other reason than that mental laziness, which in countries with less abundant literature is perhaps one of the most baneful of obstacles to the success of a writer. The preceding remarks appear to be necessary for a right appreciation of Hungarian novels. Foreign readers, and perhaps more especially the English, are apt to admire in Hungarian novels such qualities as strike them as new and “weird,” because German, French, or English novelists do not excel in them. Thus foreign readers will easily be impressed, and in many cases unduly so, by the great picturesqueness of Hungarian novelists. This quality, commendable though it no doubt is, will induce many a foreign critic to overrate the value of this or that Hungarian novel. In Hungary, picturesque turns of phrases are of the very commonest. They do not strike a Hungarian critic as being particularly meritorious. Hence the reader of the present work must not be astonished at some of the subsequent severe judgments passed on Hungarian novelistic celebrities. Far from trying to deter English or French readers from the reading of such novels as they will find criticised adversely, we would rather advise them to enjoy those novels without further regard to the views of the writer. We have in so criticising of necessity placed ourselves on a basis rather Magyar than European, and we are fully aware of the marked difference in taste to be found in the various nations of Europe. If the novelists and poets of one nation were to be judged by the taste of another, Thackeray could hardly be regarded as a great novelist, and Tennyson scarcely as a great poet. Yet both are in England recognized as two of the best writers in English literature. Of the great novelists of Hungary, four stand out as peculiarly excellent. Their names are Nicolas Jósika; Joseph Eötvös; Sigismund Kemény; and Maurus Jókai. The first three belong to the class of Magnates, being Barons; the last is a commoner by birth. It is rather curious, that the Magnates, who have in the present century given no poet of the first order to Hungary, should in the field of Hungarian novel writing have furnished three writers of the first rank, of whom one, Baron Kemény, has done work not unworthy of the greatest novel-writer of the century.