"Putnik" (The Traveller) and "Braca" (The Brothers) the greatest poet
of the Croats. It is noteworthy that when this Austrian General writes
a drama he takes for his hero the old legendary hero of the Serbs,
Marko Kraljevi['c]. The Ban of Croatia, Ivan Mazurani['c], is a Latin
poet in his youth; but when this high official too comes under the
stirring influence of Gaj he dedicates himself to his own people and
composes in "The Death of Smail Aga"[40] a poem that among
Serbian-speaking people has become so much the property of all that
the poet has been lost in the shadow of his own work. Peasants who
sing fragments of it as they toil in the fields, and the minstrel, the
guslar, who chants it for them of an evening, believe that it is, like
their folk-songs, the anonymous production of the Serbian people.

THE MAGYARS AND CROATIA'S PORT

With the General and the Ban there is the Bishop, Joseph George
Strossmayer, one of the greatest men of the nineteenth century. But
before he became Bishop of Djakovo he saw the Government suppress
those aspirations which he laboured for throughout his life. The
Austrian Government had presented Gaj, in recognition of his literary
work, with a diamond ring; but when they saw that his Illyrian
programme persisted in aiming at the union of Croatia and Dalmatia,
then at last they vetoed his Illyrianism and the word Illyria. His
friends thereupon called themselves the "National party," which was in
the Croatian Diet more numerous than the "Magyarones," who--many of
them unprogressive landlords--stood for the most absolute union with
Hungary. The National party demanded that Rieka, which was still
"separatum sacrae regni Hungariae adnexum corpus," should be united with
the rest of Croatia; but the Magyars would naturally not let their one
small port be taken from them. Those among the Magyars who consented
to discuss the matter with the Croats said that if indeed they had
purloined one Croat port (for they confessed that 350 kilometres
separate Rieka from the nearest place in Hungary), yet the Croatians
could afford to treat them with generosity, since they possessed at
least two other ports, Bakar and Zengg, that were every bit as good.
It was quite true that till Rieka was connected by the railway to the
valleys of the Save, the Drave and the Danube, she had no advantage
over Zengg and Bakar. None of these are natural ports: at Rieka there
is no protecting island, Zengg and Bakar are ava