The first of the four to attract general attention in Hungary was Baron Joseph Jósika. He was born in 1794 at Torda, in Transylvania. Having spent many years in the military service of Austria, and in travels abroad, he retired in 1818 and withdrew to Transylvania, where he pursued historic and literary studies, relating chiefly to his own province. Transylvania harbours many of the most glorious traditions of Hungarian history. For generations, especially in the seventeenth century, it was practically the only home of Magyardom. There is no lack of romantic, picturesque, or startling facts in the public or social life of that country; and Jósika, whose heart had, through his first luckless marriage, learned the depths of sorrow, as through his second wife he learned the bliss of true love, Jósika was in a position to do full justice to the wealth of picturesque characters and scenery in Transylvania’s past. His first novel, “_Abafi_,” was published in 1836, and at once received general applause on the part of the critics, and, what was still more important, at the hands of the public. Its subject is taken from the troubled times of Sigismund Bátori, when Turks, Austrians and Magyars, were fighting and intriguing for the possession of Transylvania, in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. Bátori’s mighty and tainted personality, with all his cruelty, heroism, astuteness and audacity, is, together with that of the Turkish conquerors, pashas, and court people, the personal background to the hero of the novel, Oliver Abafi, who rises from conduct dissipated and lawless, to the heights of noble self-sacrifice. The story is told with great power of description and impersonation. The reader cannot fail to feel as if quite at home in that agitated corner of Europe, where some of the historic agencies met in deadly conflict, and where men and women breathed much of that grand air of great events, which colours them in tints unknown to the people of less eventful times. The novel is intensely interesting and will convey a more life-like picture of its period than many a dull historic volume.