the old warrior, his “father,” as he calls him. Bem, himself a genius of character, at once felt and recognized the genius of Petőfi, and with great tact smoothed over difficulties arising from the poet’s wild insubordination. Against the advice and in spite of the entreaties of numerous friends, who wanted to save the poet for his country, Petőfi took actual part in various battles. He was last heard of in the battle of Segesvár, in Transylvania, on July 31st, 1849, where he died as he had long wished, fighting for his country. “To live for love, and die for one’s country”—he had not only sung it.... The works of Petőfi are both lyrical and epical; his novelistic attempts, “The Rope of the Hangman” (“_A hóhér kötele_”) are crude, so are his few essays in the drama. Amongst his epics, “_Childe John_” (“_János vitéz_”) is the best. It is a comic epic, or rather a fairy-story told with exquisite humour and exuberance of fancy. Another excellent comic epic of his is “_Bolond İstók_.” His lyrical poems are very numerous and cover, as has been already indicated, the whole range of human sentiment. Perhaps it is not superfluous to remark that there is in all the works of Petőfi not a word likely to jar on the ear of the most fastidious moralist. Like himself, his works all breathe the purity and health of untainted youth. The reader will now perhaps expect a laborious statement of the shortcomings and failings of Petőfi as a poet. And many a Hungarian critic has, apart from his professional duty to fall foul of this or that feature in the literary physiognomy of poets, pointed out some grievous drawbacks in Petőfi’s works. Thus, most critics have, while lauding the splendid lyrical subjectivity of Petőfi, pointed out his alleged incapacity to write anything else than himself. His chief deficiency, it has been asserted, is his lack of objective imagination, such as was possessed by the great epic and dramatic writers of European literature. To this the answer is, it appears to us, very simple. Petőfi never wrote a work intended to be an epic proper; nor were his attempts at dramatic composition really serious. He cannot, therefore, be legitimately reproached with having failed where he did not intend to succeed. He never deliberately worked for such achievements of objective imagination as show in the creation of dramatic personalities. Yet most of his perfect poems manifest, as we have tried to show above, that very objective imagination in the rarest form of strength. Hungarian literary criticism is still, we regret to say, in a stage of development considerably lower than Hungarian literary composition. Hence such judgments on Petőfi. Can we pronounce otherwise on the literary critics of Hungary, who have so far produced no single comprehensive study on the works of a poet who is at once their greatest and most famous genius? Genius has this peculiarity that its works are easy to enjoy but hard to criticise.