adually assembling at Pesth, commenced to issue a literary
periodical, to which Jokai largely contributed. The press, it must be
observed, was placed under the control of the police, established on
an Austrian model. The head and chief members of the police belonging
to the other parts of the Austrian empire, and totally ignorant of the
Hungarian language, were naturally obliged to employ some natives to
peruse the literary productions and translate their contents; after
due consideration of these, the verdict was passed. The consequence of
such a state of things was, that very frequently a single seemingly
portentous phrase, or even the mere title, doomed to oblivion the most
innocent work of the brain, while more substantial writing was allowed
to make its way into the country, and frequently to be again
prohibited, after having become familiar to thousands.

Most of the sketches contained in this volume, and which Jokai wrote
under the name of Sajo, underwent this fate. The latest production of
Jokai's pen is a novel entitled _The Magyar Nabob_, which is highly
praised. His strictly historical pieces, depicting scenes of the civil
war, though recalling the more vividly to mind the dreary and not yet
forgotten past, were most eagerly read in Hungary; nor will the
English reader peruse without deep emotion the fate of the Bardy
family, contained in this volume.

Within the last two years, the state of literature in Hungary, if
judged by the number of new books published, appears astonishingly
progressive. The chief reason of this phenomenon may be found in the
denationalizing measures of the Government, attempting to suppress the
national idiom by excluding it from the public schools, and
substituting in its place the German--a policy attempted without
success by Joseph II. about the end of the last century.

That the people--though now perhaps more willing than ever to give
their full support to literature--are inclined to look with some
suspicion at the productions of a press in the hands of foreign
authorities, and that many branches of a more serious nature than
novel-writing must remain excluded from the sphere of literary
activity in a country subjected to martial law, need hardly be
remarked.

Besides, some of the more prominent and elder authors still persevere
in their sad mournful silence, while others have sunk from a state of
patriotic gloom into mental imbecility. But whatever shape Hungarian
literatu