they are striking all those fetters from their nation. Peter Preradović is born in the Military Frontier and he dies an Austrian General. At the beginning of his distinguished career he could speak nothing but German, and it was in emotional German poetry that he first expressed himself. But afterwards, carried away by the new winds that were cleansing the Croat language and sweeping from it the reproach of being a mere jargon for the servants, he became in his "Putnik" (The Traveller) and "Braca" (The Brothers) the greatest poet of the Croats. It is noteworthy that when this Austrian General writes a drama he takes for his hero the old legendary hero of the Serbs, Marko Kraljević. The Ban of Croatia, Ivan Mazuranić, is a Latin poet in his youth; but when this high official too comes under the stirring influence of Gaj he dedicates himself to his own people and composes in "The Death of Smail Aga"[40] a poem that among Serbian-speaking people has become so much the property of all that the poet has been lost in the shadow of his own work. Peasants who sing fragments of it as they toil in the fields, and the minstrel, the guslar, who chants it for them of an evening, believe that it is, like their folk-songs, the anonymous production of the Serbian people. THE MAGYARS AND CROATIA'S PORT With the General and the Ban there is the Bishop, Joseph George Strossmayer, one of the greatest men of the nineteenth century. But before he became Bishop of Djakovo he saw the Government suppress those aspirations which he laboured for throughout his life. The Austrian Government had presented Gaj, in recognition of his literary work, with a diamond ring; but when they saw that his Illyrian programme persisted in aiming at the union of Croatia and Dalmatia, then at last they vetoed his Illyrianism and the word Illyria. His friends thereupon called themselves the "National party," which was in the Croatian Diet more numerous than the "Magyarones," who--many of them unprogressive landlords--stood for the most absolute union with Hungary. The National party demanded that Rieka, which was still "separatum sacræ regni Hungariæ adnexum corpus," should be united with the rest of Croatia; but the Magyars would naturally not let their one small port be taken from them. Those among the Magyars who consented to discuss the matter with the Croats said that if indeed they had purloined one Croat port (for they confessed that 350 kilometres separate Rieka from the nearest place in Hungary), yet the Croatians could afford to treat them with generosity, since they possessed at least two other ports, Bakar and Zengg, that were every bit as good. It was quite true that till Rieka was connected by the railway to the valleys of the Save, the Drave and the Danube, she had no advantage over Zengg and Bakar. None of these are natural ports: at Rieka there is no protecting island, Zengg and Bakar are available for small ships