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.

Without entering into a discussion of the Hungarian constitution, it is
well to point out one factor which lies at the root of all political and
constitutional development in Hungary and explains the Magyar outlook
for centuries past, even up to the present day. Till 1840 Latin was the
official language of the country, and in that Latin the term for the
political nation was _Populus_, which we would naturally translate as
people. But populus contrasted in Hungarian law with plebs, the _misera
plebs contribuens,_ that phrase of ominous meaning to describe the mass of
the oppressed and unenfranchised people, the populus being the nobles, a
caste which was relatively very wide, but none the less a caste, and which
enjoyed a monopoly of all political power. Till 1848 only the populus could
vote, only the plebs could pay taxes--a delightful application of the
principle, "Heads I win, tails you lose!" In 1848 the distinction was
broken down in theory, the franchise being extended beyond the privileged
class by the initiative of that class itself. But in effect the distinction
has survived to the present day in a veiled form. Political power, and,
above all, the parliamentary franchise and the county elective bodies,
continued to be a monopoly--henceforth a monopoly of the Magyar nobility,
_plus_ those classes whom they had assimilated and attached to their
cause, _against_ the other races, forming more than half the population of
Hungary. This point of populus and plebs may seem at first sight somewhat
peda