and the Theiss. I propose to enter into the question of their origin, the circumstances of their first appearance in Europe, and the temporary abodes which they occupied before they entered into their kingdom. But it may be well first to remind the reader how the coming of the Magyars utterly changed the course of European history. In the ninth century it seemed as if the Slavonic race had a great future before it in Central Europe. There was an unbroken serried array of Slavonic peoples from the peninsula of the Cimbri to the peninsula of Pelops, from the Abodrites at the mouth of the Elbe, to the Melings and Ezerites of Mount Taygetus. In the seventh century, Samo had attempted to found a Slavonic empire, but his creation had not been abiding; and at the beginning of the ninth, Liudewit had again essayed the same task, but in vain. Yet, in all probability, the enterprise would at some later period have been undertaken once more and succeeded; and if a Slavonic power had been established in Central Europe, the eastward advance of the Germans might have been checked, and all Europe beyond the Elbe might have remained Slavonic under masters of its own. But the Magyars dissipated such hopes, which a Slave of wide vision might have cherished in the days of the early Karlings. They forced themselves in, like a wedge, between the Slaves of the north and the Slaves of the south, whom they disunited for ever. They separated the southern Croatians from their brethren of White Croatia, as the western part of the present Galicia was then called. Thus the intrusion of the Hungarians favoured the growth of Germania, and injured the growth of Slavonia; and the formation of the kingdom of Hungary made possible the development of that curious state, the Austrian empire, remarkable chiefly for the random way in which it came to be what it is, and for its policy of oppressing the Slaves.

Every nation, I suppose, takes a certain pride in its history, but history and pedigree assume a larger importance for lesser nations than for greater. This is perfectly natural. When a nation is not strong, it feels that a distinguished history and a noble pedigree are a sort of substitute for strength, and give it a title to independent existence. Unluckily it is not always easy

to trace a pedigree beyond suspicion, or to establish a historical record which is quite to one's liking. There are usually a host of weaker points which enemies or cavillers are sure to seize on. And thus it is that in the histories of most of the smaller peoples of Europe there is some point on which each is specially sensitive. It is the pride of a Greek to believe that he and his countrymen are the descendants of men who fought at Salamis and Plataea. He has as strong an antipathy to the thought that a 'Hellene' could be a Slave as an Englishman has to the thought that a Briton' could be a slave; but in fact he is in all likelihood as little a Hellene as the Englishman is a Briton. You will make him very angry if you tell him. that there is probably more Slavonic than Hellenic blood among the inhabitants of modern Greece. Dr. Fallmerayer went further and said that they had not a single drop of Hellenic blood to share among them. He went too far; but one cannot help sympathising with him. The wicked Doctor must have found it great fun to bait a whole nation, conscious as he was that he had at his command an apparatus of learning, in the face of which all the Greeks of his day were. helpless. But when one is at Athens it is just as well not to declare the praises of Fallmerayer on the housetops. They cannot forget that he pointed his finger at them and said 'thou Slave!' If Fallmerayer is anathema to the Greeks, Roesler is maranatha to the 'Romans.' The first article of belief on which the salvation of a Roumanian depends is that his ancestors settled in the lands of Walachia and Siebenbürgen, at the time when Trajan added a province beyond the Danube to the Roman Empire. The Emperor Aurelius abandoned the transDanubian Dacia which Trajan had annexed; but the fate of its inhabitants and the internal history of those districts in the subsequent centuries are wrapt in obscurity. We suddenly find them inhabited by Vlachs or Romans in the late Middle Ages. Here was a delightful opportunity to teaze the Roumanians, and it was seized on by Roesler, a German scholar, learned and acute like Fallmerayer, and armed at all points. He declared that the ancestors of the modern Roumanians did not enter into their inheritance until the

thirteenth century, when they migrated northward from the Balkan peninsula. Then indeed there was raging and gnashing of teeth in the streets of Bucharest. People whose names end in escu and ilu wrote strong denunciations of the assailant of their traditions, and mustered weak arguments. But they might have done better to hold their peace ;

μὴ κίνει Καμάριναν, ἀκίνητος γὰρ ἀμείνων.

Since then indeed the Romans of the East have got Pic, just as the Greeks have got Sathas; and the extreme views of the two German assailants must be modified. But Fallmerayer and Roesler had each his fun.

It is not surprising to find that the Magyars too have a great difficulty about their pedigree and many open problems about their early history. Although the kingdom of Hungary is much stronger than either the kingdom of Roumania or the kingdom of Greece, the Hungarians are in one respect in a more delicate position than either Greeks or Roumanians. For the Greeks, whether Hellenes as they want to be, or Slaves as they want not to be, belong in any case to the IndoGermanic family; and the same is true of the Romans or Vlachs whether they crossed the Danube with Trajan or not. Those who hold that Europe should belong exclusively to Europeans will be applauded as loudly at Athens and at Bucharest as anywhere else. But such a doctrine could not be preached at Pest. The Magyars are not of the IndoEuropean family ; οὐ γὰρ ὁμὸς θρόος οὐδ' τα γῆρυς. Judged by this rule they are aliens in Europe, like the Turks. It is generally allowed, perhaps even by those who, like so many English Prime Ministers, worship as a sort of fetish 'the integrity of the Turkish Empire,' that the Turk has no business on the Bosphorus. It might also be asked what business the Ogre has on the Danube. From a general ethnographical point of view Magyars and Ottomans are in the same boat. But while at the present moment Constantinople is in Asia, it would be unfair to say that Pest is in Asia too. The men who fell at Varna and Mohacz, fell fighting for the cause of Christ against the cause of Mohammed. The Magyars since the eleventh

century have been champions of Europe against Asia; and much of the work which had been formerly done by the Eastern Roman Empire fell upon them when that Empire was broken up. Nor can it be said that the land of Kossuth, Petöfi and Jókai has not kept abreast of Western civilization. He would be an austere taskmaster who did not admit that the history of the Hungarians since the days of Stephen, the king and saint, has given them a title to the lands which they originally occupied with no other title than that of the sword.

But at the same time one can imagine that the Magyar would prefer not to have to regard himself as merely a redeemed Turk. It is natural that he should like to be certified that he is no first cousin of the infidels who cut down his ancestors at Varna and in the first battle of Mohacz. So the Hungarians have always been delighted to acquiesce in the theory which connects them very closely with the Finns, and removes them as far as possible from the Turks. The Finns are the one other nation in Europe which occupies the exceptional position of being Christian and yet not Aryan. And the Hungarians are satisfied to belong to a small group of Turanian peoples who have been able to establish a position for themselves among the Aryan races of Europe. This group is called Ugrofinnic, and includes, besides Finns and Magyars, Voguls, Ostjaks and Samojeds.

their own way.

The chief exponents of the orthodox creed that the Hungarians are kinsmen not of the Turk but of the Finn, are, on the historical side, the late Paul Hunfalvy, and, on the linguistic, Joseph Budenz, But it cannot be said that they have it all An apostate has arisen in their own land in the person of the eastern traveller and student of the Turkish languages, A. Vámbéry. He maintains that the Magyars are Turks, and he is not ashamed of it. Perhaps he is impartial. One never knows whether a man with a Magyar name is really a Magyar; names are so cleverly disguised. When the hero of Jókai's novel, Szerelem Bolondjai, made himself into Szives, who would have guessed that his father's name was Harter?

What we know of the early history of the Magyars is mainly derived from Greek writers of the Eastern Roman

Empire, and of these our chief informant is the Emperor Constantine VII., in his treatise 'Concerning the administration of the Empire,' a sort of handbook to diplomacy designed for the use of his son. When Constantine wrote, in 948 A.D., the Magyars had been settled about half a century in the lands of the Theiss and the Danube, which they occupy at the present day. They were separated from the Eastern Empire by the Bulgarian kingdom. The present kingdom of Roumania and the north coast of the Black Sea, as far as the Dnieper, were at this time in the possession of a people called the Patzinaks. East of the Patzinaks was the great kingdom of the Khazars stretching to the Lower Volga, and beyond the Khazars dwelled the Uzes or Guzes, or Kuns or Kumans, as they have been variously called, destined at a later date to appear on the scene of European history and take the place of the Patzinaks.

In his zeal to assure the pedigree of the Magyars, Hunfalvy has attempted to bring several other peoples as well, and among them the Patzinaks, into the Ugro-Finnic fold. But there can be little doubt that the Patzinaks-or Petschenegs as the German and Slaves call them, or Besenyök as the Hungarians call them were a Turkish people. Anna Comnena states that the Patzinaks and the Kuns spoke the same tongue, and there is no doubt whatever as to the ethnical position of the Kuns. The Codex Cumanicus of Petrarch, which preserves a considerable Kun vocabulary, assures us of that. We need not feel much difficulty in accepting the conclusion of Vámbéry (cap. vi.) that the Patzinaks belonged to that branch of the Turkish race which in the eleventh and twelfth centuries appeared as Kuns, two centuries later as Nogais and Turcomans in the land which extends north of the Caspian to the Volga. They are the same as the Polovetzi of the Russian chronicle which goes by the name of Nestor.

A great object of the Roman Empire was to preserve peace with the Patzinaks, who were conveniently situated between the Slaves of the Dnieper on the north, the Magyars on the West, and the Bulgarians on the south, so that if a quarrel broke out with any of these peoples, the Emperor could threaten them