The second great novelist in that period was Eötvös. Born in 1813, he received a careful education, and after extensive travels in western Europe, embraced the judicial career for a time. When still a young man, at the age of six-and-twenty, he published his first great novel, “The Carthusian” (“_A Karthauzi_,” 1839-40). This remarkable work had an immense effect. It was read with equal delight in the palaces of the magnates, and in the closets of the middle-class people. It charmed the young and moved the old. It seemed to express the very innermost cravings and mental propensities of the then Hungarian public. More than that. It expressed a state of feeling then almost universal on the continent of Europe. Like Goethe’s “_Werther_,” it lent expression to what lay dormant and unexpressed in the hearts of millions of Europeans. The sultry atmosphere then weighing on continental Europe had engendered a morbid melancholy in many a high-strung man and woman. Life seemed to be full of unsolved and unsolvable problems; full of forces disruptive and disintegrating, causing unease uncertainty and distress. All the nobler efforts of men in building up their private or public fortunes appeared to be blighted and marred by the demoniac perverseness of the political and social powers of the time. A brooding meditativeness seized people, and fresh and vigorous deeds being impossible, pale and despondent reflections embroiled men in a dumb struggle against destiny. Such was the mental temper of a very large class of men and women in France, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy. Eötvös himself had, from early youth, been given to that morbid meditativeness and self-destructive sensitiveness of the age; and the sorrowful condition of his country only increased his pathetic melancholy. Hungarian young men and women, then and now, are naturally very much more pathetic and grave than the youth of any other country. They have neither the virile alacrity of the British youth so agreeably manifested in the games and muscular amusements of young England; nor the precocious polish and gaiety of French youths. Theirs is a heavy mood, similar to that of the _Largos_ of Hungarian music, but followed by no _Friss_ or _Vivace_. To souls tuned in such minor keys, the “_Karthauzi_” came as the very revelation of their deepest secrets. Hitherto the epics and novels written in Hungary had been retrospective work. They narrated the woes and joys, the troubles and glories of past ages. In Eötvös’ novel there was, practically for the first time, a work of introspective _actualité_; a work appealing to the reader himself, and not only to his historic imagination. The queries tormenting the young men and women of that age were here subjected to an analysis full of psychological inquisitiveness, enveloped in the gloaming of poetic descriptions of Nature. The plot of the novel is of the simplest. Gustavus, a French nobleman, in whose