The reader will, we trust, permit us to premise a short remark which, especially for English readers, seems indispensable for a right appreciation of Arany. In England there has long ceased to be a peasantry proper; at any rate, there has for now over 400 years been no such peasantry in England, as may still be seen on the continent generally, and in Hungary in particular. The type “peasant” is at once the arch-type of narrow-mindedness, sordidness, _naïveté_, and spontaneous poetry. He is conservative in the extreme and slow, yet frequently the source of great upheavals and revolutions. His speech is concrete and “_terre-à-terre_,” yet at the same time full of quaint metaphors and conceits. His thoughts are all on the line of synthesis; and analysis is as strange to him as generalization. He loves Nature; but he is too much at one with it, part of it, to feel poetically the gulf between Nature and Man. Honour and respect for himself and his ancient customs are as the life-atmosphere of his existence; and thus in the social architecture of the continental state to him is allotted the staying force of the pillars, beams and rafters of the building.[3] This, the general picture of the continental peasant, has to be touched up here and there when meant to represent the Hungarian peasant proper. For, luckily for Hungarian poets, the Magyar peasant, while fully as conservative and old-fashioned as his Austrian or German brother, is considerably less sordid, more frank, and altogether more “gentlemanly.” Yet he is a peasant, a part both of Hungary’s civic and natural complexion. Now it is this Hungarian peasant, and his social complement, the rural nobleman, who are the centre of Arany’s poetry. We say “complement,” for it is at present well understood by all close students of continental nobility, that the latter is, in essence and sociological drift, if not in appearance, one and the same phenomenon as the peasantry. Both classes form the conservative or static forces of continental states, and both are necessary conditions for the existence of a _bourgeois_ proper. Without them, or without one of them, the medium or _bourgeois_ element is altogether wanting, or, as in England, of a complexion totally at variance with the continental middle class. Now in Hungary, and more especially still, in the Hungary of Arany’s youth and first manhood (1840-1870), there was no numerous _bourgeois_ proper; and Arany, singing in tones and images flowing from and meant for the two other classes only, is for that very reason _toto coelo_ different from most of the German and French and also from English poets. Modern western literature, in Austria and Germany exclusively; in France almost, and in England largely so, is _bourgeois_ poetry; poetry written by and for the middle and central classes of the community; or at any rate expressive of sentiments and mental states growing in the atmosphere of _bourgeois_ life.