creates a _genre_, a mode of poetry, but a limited one. Petőfi was impressed by both poets; he knew Burns and Béranger well, and studied them, together with Shelley, Byron, and Heine, pretty carefully. But he never imitated them, and for the simple reason that he could not do so. He was in the best sense of the word, original, that is, creative. He could imitate no one, and no one could imitate him. Petőfi cannot be classified; he is a class by himself. He cultivates, it is true, the manner and tone of the folk-song (“_népdal_”), and so to superficial critics he may appear only as the best folk-song writer of Hungary. He is infinitely more than that; in 1846, for instance, he did not write a single “_népdal_” (folk-song); he is Hungary’s greatest poet. In him is embodied the entire poetical genius of a nation, in whose single members we may frequently find the gift of improvisation and poetic invention. The rhapsodic vein so conspicuous in the everyday life of Hungary, and the exaggerations of which have vitiated many an effort, literary or musical, comes out in Petőfi in its full vigour and full beauty. Like all great poets, he is intensely truthful. There is no sham whatever in him, no affectation and no false note. His passion is terribly real, and his mirth, true joy. Nowhere can this absolute truthfulness be noticed with greater clearness; nowhere does it shine forth more imposingly than in one of Petőfi’s wildest, and apparently most exaggerated poems, “The Madman” (“_Az őrült_”). It is a monologue of a mad Titan, whose fine intellect has been unhinged by ingratitude of friends, treachery of women, and undeserved reverses. We do not hesitate to say that there is in the whole range of European literature no other single poem representing the demoniac charm of a mind at once vigorous and diseased with equal force and truth. Constantly moving on the edges of abysses than which the human mind or heart does not know any more appalling, the “madman” yet talks with a power and lucidity so overwhelming as to send through his hearers the holy shivers of religious prostration. Distorted in form, terribly true in substance; such is the character of this unique poem, in which all the serpents of scorn and pain seem to wriggle beneath the leaves of the beautiful word-foliage. From Petőfi emanates the very soul of poetry and of all art: enthusiasm, inspiration. After having written comic epics, love-poems, and genre-pictures with a success never before witnessed, Petőfi, on the approach of the revolutionary period, wrote those inflammatory patriotic songs, the power of which was officially recognized by the Hungarian Government, who had enormous numbers of Petőfi’s patriotic poetry printed at their expense and distributed among the soldiers of the revolutionary armies. His poems were then a national event, and they may in justice be compared to a series of different “_Marseillaises_.”