mounted guard during the bitter winter, he at last was dismissed from the service on account of symptoms of consumption. In the following two or three years we find him tramping over all Hungary, writing verse, and eking out a miserable livelihood by means of acting on provincial stages. The great poet long believed in his vocation as an actor, and obstinately stuck to a determination that met nowhere with any serious encouragement. Meanwhile, however, his verses had made him a well-known poet, and soon the idol of the country. In his travels to the north of Hungary he was received, more especially at Kassa and Eperjes, with honours usually accorded only to royalty. The nation felt that he was the living personification of all the political and poetical aspirations of the Magyars then struggling for manifestation. In 1846 he made, in the county of Szathmár, the acquaintance of that strange and ill-balanced girl, who was to become his wife. Juliet Szendrey was her name. She was the daughter of a steward on one of the great estates of a Hungarian nobleman, and had from early years shown symptoms of that malady which is now more widely known under the name of “new womanism,” or “_féminisme_.” Accordingly, she was eccentric and aimless, and when Petőfi made love to her she was at a loss how to respond to a feeling so simple and natural. Having given Petőfi some cruel samples of the waywardness of her temper, it occurred to her that she might inflict even more pain on her father by marrying the poor poet, and consequently she did so against the wish of her parent. The young couple lived in very primitive lodgings in Pest, and Madame took her fame as the wife of a great man with very grand airs. She so intensely appreciated the happiness of being wedded to a young genius and an affectionate husband, that she married, not quite a year after Petőfi’s disappearance on the battlefield of Segesvár, a man in every way infinitely inferior to Petőfi. Can anything prove the Fata Morgana character of poetry and of poets more cruelly than the ever infamous conduct of that highly cultivated woman, who, after having been idolized and, in verses, immortalized by one of the greatest of poets, showed her worthlessness by marrying a mediocrity before a single year had elapsed after the glorious death of her husband, whose infant son still required all her care? But let us return to the poet. A few months after his marriage Petőfi began his political career by announcing to the people of Pest the abolition of the censorship, and by reading to the enthusiastic crowd his famous poem, “Rise o’ Magyar” (“_Talpra magyar!_”), on the Ides of March, 1848. Towards the end of the same year he took service in the revolutionary army, and was attached to the Polish general, Bem, a hero wounded in untold battles for liberty, and then serving the cause of the Magyars in Transylvania. Few letters are more touching than the letters written by Petőfi in fair French to