Page:A history of Hungarian literature.djvu/88

74 Hungarian literature to equal their pleasant, fluent, conversational style. There is no pompousness, no affectation; all is life and grace and transparent sincerity. Three groups of the letters are especially interesting: those dealing with the life of the Hungarian emigrants, with Turkish life and customs, and those relating historical anecdotes.

Those which tell of the personal history of the unfortunate Prince Rákóczy make the strangest appeal to us. Mikes describes the sad, lonely life which the Prince led. Deeply religious, he never missed the Church services. His leisure, and, alas! he had plenty, was usually spent in carpentering or at his joiner's bench. Mikes adds "how very well he did even that work." Some years after the Prince's death, his son Joseph made an unlucky attempt to enter Hungary, but the enterprise failed, the small Hungarian army had to retire, and young Rákóczy died, as his father had done, in the arms of the faithful Mikes. "A curious world," writes Mikes in his last letter. "How many changes have I witnessed? When I wrote my first letter to you, dear cousin, I was but twenty-seven, and now sixty-nine years weigh upon me."

The letters give us a perfect picture of the inner and outer life of a man whose strength was sustained by the priceless blessings of a calm confidence in God and a happy optimistic view of the world around him.

The literary life of Hungary in the eighteenth century presents a desolate picture.

Even the two men who may justly be regarded as the most notable figures of that day lived far from their fatherland—Mikes on the shores of the Sea of Marmora, and Francis Faludi in the heart of the Eternal City, at St. Peter's in Rome. For several years Faludi was a confessor there.