appeared in the shape of the Russian colossus, and the history of two centuries is dominated by Austro-Russian rivalry in the Balkans. Here we are confronted by the first of those lost opportunities in which the history of modern Austria is unhappily so rich. During the eighteenth century Austria became, as it were, the chief home of bureaucratic government, first under Maria Theresa, one of the greatest women-sovereigns, then under her son Joseph II. A series of "enlightened experiments" in government, typical of the age of Voltaire and of Frederick, and honestly conducted _for_ the people, though never _by_ the people, ended as such experiments are apt to end, in failure. The most that can be said is that the bureaucratic machine had become more firmly fixed in the groove which it was henceforth to occupy. The failure of Joseph II. was above all due to his inability to recognise the meaning of Nationality, to his attempt to apply Germanisation as the one infallible remedy for all internal difficulties in his dominions. The idea of Nationality, already gaining strength, obtained a fresh impetus from the French Revolution. While in the west it sowed the seeds of United Italy and United Germany, which the nineteenth century was to bring to fruition, in the Balkans it stirred waters which had seemed dead for centuries, and led to the uprising of the Serbs and Greeks, then of the Roumanians, and finally a generation later of the Bulgarians. In the Habsburg dominions the same movement revealed itself in the revival of national feeling in Hungary, Bohemia, and Croatia, but nowhere more strongly than in Hungary, where it was accompanied by a remarkable literary revival and the appearance of a group of Magyar poets of real genius. The Kingdom of Hungary, which from 1526 to 1687 had been partially under Turkish rule, led a vegetable existence during the eighteenth century. This lull was a necessary period of recuperation after exhausting wars. The ancient Hungarian constitution, dating in its essentials from the thirteenth century, but fallen on evil days during the Turkish era, now came more and more out of abeyance. Its fundamental principles were reaffirmed by the famous laws of Leopold II. (1790-92), and after a further relapse due to the Napoleonic wars, a long series of constitutional and linguistic reforms were introduced by successive parliaments between 1825 and 1848.