with enthusiasm, and all that was finest and best in the mind of statesman or poet was codensed into the one ideal of serving the fatherland. We can hardly find another age in history which, during a time of peace, can show such splendid examples of exalted patriotism, as the period between 1810 and 1848. And the hearts of other men must have been great to have enabled them to understand and value these patriots.
The men implicated in the Martinovics conspiracy were executed at the Vérmező, in Buda. One by one they fell, Sigray, Laczkovics, Szentmarjay, who when preparing to place his bead upon the block, whistled the Marseillaise, the noble dreamer Hajnóczy, and last, Martinovics. Next day, in the very ground which had drunk their blood, rose trees were planted, bearing sweet-scented flowers. Like these, the flower of Hungarian poetry sprang from the blood of the martyrs.
The present generation knew but one of those great pioneers in person, Francis Toldi, the first writer in Hungary on the history of literature. The veteran soldiers of England could not speak with more veneration of the victorious heroes of Trafalgar or Waterloo than Toldi spoke of his great contemporaries, the two Kisfaludys, Kazinczy, and Vörösmarty. Kazinczy, in spite of his keen critical faculties, was capable of great enthusiasm. A good Hungarian poem moved him to tears merely because it was Hungarian, and on seeing some new building erected to beautify his country, such as the cathedral at Esztergom, he burst out into exclamations of joy.
About the end of the eighteenth century a young Hungarian gentleman went to Transylvania, the part of the country which, though inhabited by many foreign
