Now it is the peculiar greatness of Petőfi that many of his poems appeal to the sentiments and mental attitudes of that specifically modern public, the _bourgeois_ readers, with a force and sympathy as strong as is the charm of many others to the “common people” or peasants of Hungary. It is said of Pico de Mirandola that while he excited the awe and admiration of the most learned and thoughtful men at the end of the fifteenth century Rome and Florence, the maidens and young men of the beautiful city on the Arno were singing with delight his exquisite love-songs. Such is Petőfi; such is not Arany. He cannot properly be enjoyed except in his own Magyar, and by readers intimately acquainted with the two classes he belongs to. Not even when he selects, as he sometimes does, foreign subjects, as in his “_The Bards of Wales_,” does he become less “clannish.” Of the strongest of all feelings of young humanity, of Love, he has none but epic expression; he never wrote a love-song proper. The women in his epics are mere phantasms, angels or fiends; and his men are peasants or heroes, or both. The point on which he excels every other Hungarian poet, and on which will repose his lasting fame, is his language. It has the raciness of the peasant’s talk with the moderation of refined style. In other countries writers introduced new elements of poetic speech by means of using words or phrases taken or imitated from one of the dialects of their province or county. Even in Shakespeare there are traces of the then Warwickshire dialect, and probably still more of Warwickshire folk-lore. German writers have legitimated innumerable provincialisms. Hungarian, on the other hand, has no dialects, or none to speak of. The writer who wants to find new linguistic affluents can turn only to the stock used by the peasants in the vast plain of Hungary. Arany, replete as he was with all the wealth of the language used by the peasants, knew how to ennoble and purify the language of the farmers and shepherds of the _puszta_, and to impart to it much of that Greek simplicity and beauty of which, as a scholar, he was so competent a student. As the French language is not rich in words but in idioms, so Hungarian is not rich in words but in word-formations. Especially the verb admits of a variety of forms and terminations enveloping every shade of thought or movement with the glibness of water. It is in such linguistic feats that Arany shows his genius; and since language in Hungary has an importance tenfold more significant than in countries composed of less polyglot peoples, it is quite natural that in the literary appreciation of Arany at the hands of Magyar critics the political element has played a very considerable part. This is, as we stated above, his great merit. Language in all modern countries has at first been the make of the peasant classes. In them there is that mysterious and instinctive power which has produced