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political offence. On his father's release, Balint accompanied him to
court, and was also present at the coronation diet of Pressburg in 1572. He
then joined the army and led a merry life at the fortress of Eger. Here he
fell violently in love with Anna Losonczi, the daughter of the hero of
Temesvar, and evidently, from his verses, his love was not unrequited. But
a new mistress speedily dragged the ever mercurial youth away from her, and
deeply wounded, she gave her hand to Krisztof Ungnad. Naturally Balassa
only began to realize how much he loved Anna when he had lost her. He
pursued her with gifts and verses, but she remained true to her pique and
to her marriage vows, and he could only enshrine her memory in immortal
verse. In 1574 Balint was sent to the camp of Gaspar Bekesy to assist him
against Stephen Bathory; but his troops were encountered and scattered on
the way thither, and he himself was severly wounded and taken prisoner. His
not very rigorous captivity lasted for two years, and he then disappears
from sight. We next hear of him in 1584 as the wooer and winner of
Christina Dobo, the daughter of the valiant commandant of Eger. What led
him to this step we know not, but it was the cause of all his subsequent
misfortunes. His wife's greedy relatives nearly ruined him by legal
processes, and when in 1586 he turned Catholic to escape their persecutions
they declared that he and his son had become Turks. His simultaneous
desertion of his wife led to his expulsion from Hungary, and from 1589 to
1594 he led a vagabond life in Poland, sweetened by innumerable amours with
damsels of every degree from cithara players to princesses. The Turkish war
of 1594 recalled him to Hungary, and he died of his wounds at the siege of
Esztergom the same year. Balassa's poems fall into four divisions:
religious hymns, patriotic and martial songs, original love poems, and
adaptations from the Latin and German. They are all most original,
exceedingly objective and so excellent in point of style that it is
difficult even to imagine him a contemporary of Sebastian Tinodi and Peter
Ilosvay. But his erotics are his best productions. They circulated in MS.
for generations and were never printed till 1874, when Farkas Deak
discovered a perfect copy of them in the Radvanyi library. For beauty,
feeling and transporting passion there is nothing like them in Magyar
literature till we come to the age of Michael Csokonai and Alexander
Petofi. B