wed off to advantage so many
unexpected beauties of the Hungarian language that his readers were
fairly enchanted and carried away by them. His articles were a happy
compound of poetical elevation and oratorical power, gratifying
common-sense and the imagination at the same time, appealing by their
lucid exposition to the reader's intelligence, and exciting and warming
his fancy by their fervor. Kossuth always rightly guessed what questions
most interested the nation, and the daily press became, in his hands, a
power in Hungary, electrifying the masses, who were always ready to give
their unconditional support to his bold and far-reaching schemes.

The extraordinary influence obtained by Kossuth through his paper
frightened Szechenyi, and, to even a greater degree, those whose
prejudices were shocked or ancient privileges and interests were
endangered by the democratic agitations for reform. Kossuth was attacked
in books, pamphlets, and newspapers, but he came out victorious from all
contests. In vain did Szechenyi himself, backed by his great authority
in the land, assail him, declaring that he did not object to Kossuth's
ideas, but that his manner and his tactics were reprehensible, and that
the latter were sure to lead to a revolution. The great mass of the
people felt instinctively that revolution had become a necessity and was
unavoidable if Hungary was to pass from the old mediaeval order to the
establishment of modern institutions and was to become a state where
equality before the law should be the ruling standard. The masses were
strengthened in this conviction by the unreasonable, short-sighted, and
violent policy pursued by the Government of Vienna, which obstructed the
slightest reforms in the ancient institutions and opposed every national
aspiration, and under whose protecting wing the reactionary elements of
the Upper House were constantly paralyzing the noblest and best efforts
made by the Lower House for the public weal, while the same Government
arbitrarily supported claims of the Catholic clergy, in flat
contradiction to the rights and liberties of the various denominations
inhabiting the country.

The Government, in its antipathy to the national movement, went even
further. It secretly incited the other nationalities, especially the
Croats, against the Hungarians, and thus planted the seeds from which
sprang the subsequent great civil war. In observing the dangerous
symptoms preceding the last-menti