It is impossible to tell here, even very briefly, the plots and characters of the very numerous novels written by Jósika both in Hungary and at Dresden, whither he retired after escaping the Austrians, who had sentenced him to death as one of the prominent members of the Hungarian “rebels.” All these novels are historic in subject, and even quote, sometimes, chapter and verse from the chronicles on which they are based. The most famous are “_Esther_;” “_Francis Rákóczy II._,” the hero of which is the most popular of all Hungarian princes who ever revolted from the Habsburgs; “A Hungarian Family during the Revolution” (“_Egy magyar család a forradalom alatt_”); “The Last Báthory” (“_As utolsó Báthory_”). Jósika is easily compared to and measured by Walter Scott. Yet there is in the very tendencies of their works a marked difference. Scott, in writing his novels, was prompted more by his literary tastes and proclivities than by any consideration of politic aims. Both Scotland and England were during his life-time (1771-1832) at the height of their triumphal career. His novels were romantic work pure and simple. England being at the head of the powers combating the French Revolution, her literary geniuses, too, followed lines opposed to modern Liberalism; in other words, they became romantic. Hungary, on the other hand, was, during the life-time of Jósika, an oppressed country, and after a short period of glory during her war of independence, she vegetated for over ten years in a torpor caused by a fiercely reactionary government. Into Jósika’s novels, therefore, there necessarily entered a political element, which coloured his work with a tint unknown to the great Scotchman’s tales. And this, together with the circumstance of his becoming rapidly a “standard” novelist, explains Jósika’s literary eminence and also his literary failings. In his attempt to use the story of Hungary’s past as a means of reviving her present, he naturally lost sight of some of the purely literary laws of novel-writing. His characters being already given by history, he neglected to elaborate their psychology. Events happen rather unto or by them, than through them. The inner machinery of motives is sometimes clumsy or too flimsy. Being much in demand as a “standard” novelist, he wrote much; too much. Yet with all these occasional shortcomings, Jósika is one of the most splendid novelists of the picturesque class. Few Hungarian books recording Hungary’s past will give the foreign reader a more pleasing and, at the same time, instructive picture of the romantic days of that great country. The professorial critic, reposing on the tattered laurels of his victims, if not on his own, will find much to rebuke in Jósika. The youth of Hungary and the unprejudiced foreigner will always read him with delight. CHAPTER XXV.