How many good men, who were here, are here no longer; and how many who remain would grieve but little if they, too, were numbered with the dead.
The hero of battles is once more a robber and a fugitive. The iron hand of the law drives him from land's end to land's end.
In the mad-house mopes a captain of hussars, and ever repeats,—"Wait but a moment!" None there can guess the meaning of his words.
Only George of St Thomas is happy. He sleeps in a welcome grave, dreaming of sweet renown and deep revenge.
We have suppressed two chapters of this tale, both for want of space, and because they are unpleasantly full of horrors. They are chiefly occupied with the vengeance wreaked by George, who is frightfully mutilated in the course of the war, upon the Serbs, and especially upon his deadly foe Basil; and include an account of the capture by assault, and subsequent conflagration, of the town of St Thomas. They are in no way essential to heighten or complete the interest of those we have given; and L'Envoy is as appropriately placed at the end of the third chapter as at the close of the fifth. The plot of the whole tale, if such it may be called, is quite unimportant; but there is an originality and a wild vigour in many of the scenes, which justify, in combination with other German translations from the Magyar that have lately reached us, an anticipation of yet better things from the present generation of Hungarian poets and novelists.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] Schlachtfelderblüthen aus Ungarn. Novellen nach wahren Kriegs-Scenen. Leipzig und Pesth, 1850. London: Williams and Norgate.