tengerszemü hölgy" is certainly the most brilliant of Jókai's later, and perhaps2 the[Pg xii] most humorous of all his works. It was justly crowned by the Hungarian Academy as the best Magyar novel of the year 1890, and well sustains the long-established reputation of the master. Apart from the intensely dramatic incidents of the story, and the originality and vividness of the characterization, "A tengerszemü hölgy" is especially interesting as being, to a very great extent, autobiographical. It is not indeed a professed record of the author's life-like "Emlékeim" (My Memoirs) for instance. It professes to be a novel, and a most startling novel it is. Yet in none of Jókai's other novels does he tell us so much about himself, his home, and his early struggles both as an author and a patriot; he is one of the chief characters in his own romance. Of the heroine, Bessy, I was about to say that she stood alone in fiction, but there is a certain superficial resemblance, purely accidental of course, between her and that other delightful and original rogue of romance, Mrs. Desborough, in Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson's "More New Arabian Nights," though all who have had the privilege of making the acquaintance of both ladies will feel bound to admit that Jókai's Bessy, with her five husbands, is even more piquant, stimulating, and fascinating than Mr. Stevenson's charming and elusive heroine.

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R. NISBET BAIN.

[1] I do not forget Kármán, Jósika, and Eötvös, but the former was an imitator of Richardson, and the two latter of Walter Scott.

[1]

[2] I say "perhaps," as I can only claim to have read twenty-five out of Jókai's one hundred and fifty novels.

[2]

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