KAZINCZY, FERENCZ, or FRANCIS, the most active and suc cessful contributor to the restoration of Hungarian literature and the Hungarian language, was born on the 27th of October 1759, at Er Semlybn, in the county of Bihar. For the first ten years of his life he resided with his parents, who were Protestant and noble, at Lower Regmecz, where he heard no language spoken but the Hungarian. Before the age of ten his propensity for authorship had developed itself in a singular manner. His father, though not yet forty, was in the habit of telling long stories after dinner, which the rest of the company found rather tedious, but which so struck the imagination of the boy that he secretly committed them to writing. His tutor discovered the manuscripts, and showed them to the father as a sad proof of the way in which the boy was wasting his time ; the elder Kazinczy looked over them with complacency, and returned them with the remark, "My son will be a great author,"—a prophecy which turned out true. At that time the nobles of Hungary placed all their hopes of distinction in the field of sport or the field of battle, while the nobles of Transylvania were noted for a fondness for seeing their names on the title-page of a book either as authors or dedicatees. The elder Kazinczy, full of the future fame of his sou, was smitten the Transylvanian mania, and anxious to see him in print ; and before he was fifteen, Ferencz, nothing loth, had a work in the press of translations from the German of Gellert, some of whose works had fallen Into his hands by accident; though German literature was at that time so little known in Hungary that even the names of Wieland and Klopstock had not penetrated through the barrier of ignorance that guarded the frontier. Before the volume was completed, young Kazinczy had the misfortune to lose his father, who died in 1774, but his mother was no lees anxious for its appearance, and under her auspices be was an author before he was sixteen. Long previous to this time, at the age of ten, he had been sent with two of his brothers to the high school of Patak, which ho did not leave till 1779, when ho was twenty. The school of Patak was conducted at that period in a very eccentric manner—one of the professors who lectured on uni versal history took eighteen years to make his way to the end of the third century, much of course to the edification of his pupils. When Kazinczy left it he was provided with a good knowledge of the classics, to which he added an acquaintance with French and German, which he had acqUired elsewhere. He went to Caschau to study law, but the profession of advocate did not please him, and he was fortunate enough to receive from one friend, Count Lorincz Orczy, the poet of official notary to one of the counties, and by the recommendation of another, Count Lajos Torok, that of inspector of schools, a position which exactly answered his wishes.
The ten years of the reign of Joseph II., from 1780 to 1790, wore a period of singular changes in Hungary, as well as in the rest of his donnuions. In 1784 the omperor issued his decree for the introduc tion of German as the official language of the country in place of Latiu, a decree which had a strong influence in promoting what it was intended to crush. Among the cultivators of the language which the sovereign aimed at extirpating, Kazinczy was perhaps the most enthusiastic, and he was ever remarked for the singular beauty of his style and the tact with which he enlarged the domain of the language. The Hungarian is very distinct in its origin and in much of its formation from the other cultivated languages of Europe; it does not belong to the Indo-European family, which embraces such varying idioms as Greek and English, Spanish and Russian, but to a family which has been sometimes called the Tartarian, the Turanian, and the Sethitic, and which comprises, along with the Hungarian, the Turkish, the Finnish, the Moogol and Manchoo Tartar, and various others. With these however it bears very little affinity in its vocabulary, though much in its grammar. From long disuse as a language of composition for anything but books of devotion, it was at the time that Kazinczy began to cultivate it destitute of many of the terms most necessary to express the common ideas of the 18th century. To display and extend its powers, he set himself to translate into it some of the leading masterpieces of the French and German drama, and also of the English, but as seen through a German medium, for his Hamlet' was taken not from Shakapere but from Schroeder, which is Hamlet with the poetry omitted. To these he added Marmontel's Tales and Ossian's Poems. His friends him to original composition, but he replied that he would rather be a good translator than a bad original, and with the object that he had in view, that of refining and expanding the language, it is probable that his course was a right one. To those who objected to his numerous new words and phrases, and complained that tho public would not understand him, he replied in the words of Klopstock to Basedow on a similar occasion, "Let them learn to understand me." It has been remarked by Mr. Watts of the British Museum, in a paper on the modern Hungarian, read before tho London Philological Society, that he carried his point, and that "few men have ever had so large a share in the formation, it might almost bo said in the manufacture of a language." as Kazinczy. Ile was distinguished from his namesakes among his own kin as "Kasinczy a nyelvfarager," Kazinczy, the language carver. WhIlebney with his translations he did not omit to employ for his purpose the influence of periodical*. lie established at Caselieu in 17SS, with his friends Szabo and Bacaanyl, the first Hungarian magazine, the 'Magyar Museum,' which has left so good a memory behind it that the leading magazine now published at Pesth, the Uj Magyar Museum,' or 'New Magyar Museum,' is named after it. The editors however did not agree, the work came to an end, and Kazinezy then published alone the ' Orpheus' in 1790. In that year the emperor Joseph died; his decrees against the Hungarian language might bo said to have died before him, and many of his other innovations were at once rescinded. Kazinezy lost his post of inspector of schools on the ground of hie being a non-Catholic, but he was encouraged to hope for another place in compensation. After the short reign of Leopold ho presented himself as a petitioner to the emperor Francis when he came in June 1792 to be crowned at Buda as king of Hungary, and the emperor told him that the place he asked for bad been given to his friend ]Iajnoczy. t' Your majesty," replied not have chosen a better man." Struck with his generous spirit the king replied, "If I see you ten years hence I shall not have forgotten your words, and to show how I appreciate them I will appoint you to any other poet you name." Probably no other eligible post was at that time vacant, for the first favour that the king had an opportunity of granting the author appears to have been his rescue from the scaffold. ilajnoczy engaged in what is called the "Jacobin conspiracy " of Ilartiuovics, a plot, the history of which is still enveloped in much darkness, but which at all events involved the formation of secret societies who distributed catechisms of the rights of man, which in those days the ruling powers might be expected to view with sus picion. The principal members were men of learning and attainments;
Martinovics, the leader, enjoyed from the court the revenues of the abbey of Seaver, and was director of the royal cabinet of natural history. When the conspiracy was discovered, Kazinczy, who had been led into it by Hajnoczy, was arrested nt his mother's residence at Lower Regmeez, on the night of the 14th of December 1791, and carried to Buda for trial. Ono of his fellow-prisoners, who was father of a family, implored him to be firm and not to disclose any thing as the result would be general ruin, Kazinczy therefore denied all knowledge of anything treasonable in the first instance and after wards found that this very father of a family had himself given way and made a merit of deuounciug him. He than reroked his former denials and throw himself on the mercy of the king. On tho 8th of May 1795 he received sentence of death, he appealed, and the sentence was confirmed by a superior court. Finally, after a period of trying suspense, Martinovics, and six others, one of whom was Eajnoczy, were beheaded at the castle of Buda, and the sentence of the remainder, of whom Kazinczy was one, was commuted to imprisonment "till they had shown signs of sufficient penitence." Kazinczy spent in the dungeons of Buda, Brunn, Kufstein, and Munkacs the long period of 2387 days. At first his confinement was very severe, he passed some of the early months at Brunn in a damp underground dungeon, where his limbs becamo so crippled that he could not rise from his bed of straw, but wherever he went he gained the good will of his keepers, indulgences were more and more allowed him, and at last he spent some of his hours of imprisonment in translating Sterne's 'Sentimental Journey,' in the course of which the well-known passage on the Captive must have forcibly struck him. We are told in tho tenth edition of the 'German Converse tlons-Lexikon' that a diary of his imprisonment was published at Pesth in 1848, the year of the Hungarian revolution, by Vahot. In the collection of his familiar letters published in 1843 and 1845, there is very little allusion to this gloomy hiatus in hie career. Soon after his liberation in 1801 he married Sophia, the daughter of his old friend and patron Count Lajos Torok, and for the remainder of IA life be was established at his country-residence in `Szdphalous' or 'Fairhill,' In the neighbourhood of Tokay, a name which has become classical to the cultivators of Hungarian letters. Ha saw springing up around him a literature every year growing in extent and value, couched in the very language which he had had so much hand iu forming, and his voice was the most influential in the award of Hungarian fame. He was a frequent contributor to the Hungarian periodicals, the 'Erdelyi Museum' and the "fudomanyos Oyujte meny,' and to the Vienna ‘Jahrbticher der Litteratur,' and his attention was always alive to any now appearance in the field of Hungarian poetry . He was the friend of almost every author of note, of Alexander Kisfaludy till the freedom of his criticisms offended him, and afterwards of Charles Kisfaludy at his own eager request. He edited the works of Dajka, Baroczl, and Kis, and of Zrinyi the poet, as he is called to distinguish him from his ancestor Zrinyi the warrior, and ha published a volume of reprints of old Hungarian grammars under the title of Magyar Itegisegek os Ititkrusarek,' or 'Magyar Antiquities and Rarities. His own poems are chiefly of the class of Horatian epistles, in which a mild philosophy and a system of ;esthetics are illustrated and enlivened with frequent references to his personal experience, bnt one sot of short poems under the title of Tovieek ds VIragok," Thorns and Flowers,' is of a more epigrammatic, and lively character. lie was fond altogether of the epistolary form—his chief original prose work, the 'Erdelyi Levelek,' or 'Transylvanian Letters,' is au account of a tour In Transylvania which he effected iu 1810, and which he thus described to give him a better opportunity of iuter mingling hie own personal recollections with the narrative. These letters however, which ware originally intended for the press, are not so attractive to read as his real correspondence with his friends. Kis and Szent Gyorgyi, the former himself a poet of some note, in which there is a running commentary on the progress of the Hungarian language and literature for a period of about forty years, intermingled with glimpses into the interior of a happy home enlivened by the presence of a large and united family. On the whole, cheered by the constant progress of Hungary, his life passed happily, and sur rounded by honours. The only great drawback to his welfare was a lawsuit., in which, after the death of his father-in-law, he was obliged to engage with his wife's brother for his wife's inheritance.. It was decided in his favour in 1829 after a contest of niueteen years, but as he mournfully observed, "nineteen years are gone,—my children have not had the education that 1 should have given them otherwise, I have not led the easy life that I should have led, had 1 been able to draw my income, and I have been plunged in debts, out of which I shall never emerge." On the establishment of the Hungarian Academy in 1830—an event which he saw with joy—he was the first elected member. In 1831 he published his last work, A Tour to Pennon halma.' The appearance of the cholera drove him home, and iu Hungary the cholera led to savage outbreaks on the part of the peasantry, who attributed the epidemic to a conspiracy of the upper classes. On the 18th of August he wrote to a friend, "1 and mine are still alive—but in what times I" Four days afterwards the cholera carried him off. He died, says the author of his life in the ' Ujabbkori Isweratok Tara,' from which much of our narrative is taken, " in the seventy-second year of his life and the fifty-sixth of his authorship." The fame of Kazioczy appears to be rather on the rise than the ebb. "We are more in want of a Kazinczy now," says the Hungarian writer already quoted, "than we were twenty years back." There are two so-called collections of his works, but the first in nine volumes published between 1814 and 1816 contains little but translations; the second commenced in 1836, but still incomplete, having been appar ently stopped by the revolution, contaius his letters published for the first time after his death, and which now seem likely to preserve his memory better than any of his more elaborate writings. This col lection is edited by Schedel and Bajza. Oue of his nephews, Genoa Or GADRILL KAELNCZY (born iu 1818) took AU active part iu the revo lution of 1818, but was fortunate enough to be included in the arnuesty after it, and is now engaged at Peath in historical researches. Ile is the author of Malvina, a tale,' of some translations from Denham and an active writer iu the periodicals.