of Hungarian nationality, add to the types of poetry produced by other nations, a type, a species so individual and so richly personal as to endow it with a literary vocation altogether its own. If we are to reduce this peculiarly Magyar element to the precincts of a word, we should say it is the rhapsodic element. By this we mean a peculiar temper of the inspired mind pervading its joyous, humorous, meditative or despondent moods alike. As Liszt is the greatest exponent of this rhapsodic element in music, so Petőfi is in poetry. Most other rhapsodic poets or musicians, Magyar or otherwise, have badly failed, some by degenerating into rant or redundancy, others by becoming formless. Petőfi alone succeeded in raising rhapsodies to the level of true art. It was said above that Petőfi’s works are not in need of much commentary, even for the foreigner. We may now add that the only commentary needed is a knowledge of Petőfi’s life. Petőfi’s short life as a poet was coeval with the great awakening of the Magyar nation to the full consciousness of its position and its rights. He was born in 1823, in Kis-Körös, and was the son of a well-to-do butcher, by the name of Petrovics, husband to a Slav woman, called Mary Hruz. For historians who believe in the race-theory, there is ample room for speculation, sympathetic or malevolent, in the fact that the beloved mother of Hungary’s greatest Magyar poet belonged to the “race” of the Slavs, whom all staunch Magyars are disinclined to reckon amongst human beings. “_Tót nem ember, kása nem étel_” (“The Slav is no human being, and porridge is no meal”), holds the Hungarian proverb. Fully convinced as we are that there is no truth whatever in the race-theory, we can only see in the fact of Petőfi being the child of a Slav mother and a Magyar (or Magyar-speaking) father a providential fact creating Hungary’s greatest poet from amongst a _milieu_ saturated with both of the main elements of Hungarian society: Magyar and Slav. Young Petőfi spent his youth in the large plains between the Theiss and the Danube, and the impressions of that picturesque portion of Hungary have left their indelible traces on his imagination. At the age of fifteen, Petőfi was deprived of the comfort he had so far enjoyed, by the financial failure of his father. From that time onward he led a life replete with hardships of all kinds. At school he was a failure, and even in poetics, as he has told us in one of his humorous poems, he was “ploughed.” Being somewhat too fond of the inspiration of the wine-cup, or at least being credited with such fondness, he soon fell out with his hosts, his teachers and finally with his father. From the misery of his position he tried to save himself by volunteering as a private in the Austrian army. The very harsh treatment he had to endure as a soldier told on his health, and although he had still moral strength left to scribble his poems on the planks of the sentry-box in which he