DOBRENTEI, GABOR or GABRIEL, an Hungarian author and antiquary of distinguished merit., was born at Nagy.Szolliis, in the county of Veszprim in 1786. He showed very early not only a remark able zeal for the Hungarian language and literature, but a eiagular social talent for enlisting others in his views. At Oedenburg, a town not far within the frontier from Austria, and chiefly inhabited by Germane, he succeeded in getting up an If ungarian literary society, of which he became the secretary; and under his superintendence, when a youth of nineteen, a volume of ' Transactions' was published. At twenty he studied at Wittenberg and Leipsic, and in 1807 was recein mended by Kazinesy, then the almost acknowledged head of Hungarian literature, t, the post of tutor to Count Louis Gyulay, a nobleman of Transylvania, which made him for some years a resident in that country. With the literary contributions of some of his Hungarian and Transylvanian friends, and the pecuniary contributions of the Transylvanian magnates, be set on foot and edited a magazine, the Erdelyi Muzeum,' of which the first number was issued at KInuson burg and the remaining nine at Pesth, after which it ceased for want of support; but it contained so many articles of interest that no Hungarian library is considered complete ifithout it. In 1820 Dtibrentei removed to Pesth, where he continued to reside for the remainder of his life, in the occupation of several highly-respectable official posts of a legal character, and in such constant literary activity that he became the acquaintance or friend of almost every person of any note connected with Hungarian literature. Indeed almost all the information that has been put in circulation on that subject in England bad its origin in Diebrentei. He was the friend and correspondent of Dr. now Sir John Bowring, to whom he supplied much of the informa tion for his Poetry of the Magyara; be also communicated to Miss Pardoe materials for her account of Hungarian literature and authors in her City of the Magyar,' and he wrote the article on the subject in the Leipsic Cooversations-Lexikon,' which, by its being translated in Lieber's Encyclopedia Americana,' and the translation reprinted in the Glasgow 'Popular Encyclopedia,' has become familiar to thousands of English readers. As a poetical writer, Dobrentel was not successful; his original poems appear to have been pleasing, and no more; and though his translation of Shakspere's 'Macbeth ' was acted at Presburg in 1825, it did not receive such a welcome as to encourage the publi cation of his versions of the other masterpieces of Shakspere, which were reserved in Hungarian for the more successful pen of a lady, Emilia Lemouton, who is, we believe, the only translatress of our great poet in any language. Dobreotei was more at home in his exertions to establish a 'Casino' at Pesth, an establishment of nearly the same kind as an English club of our own days, but borrowed both in plan and name from Italy, where it is made use of not to render more exclusive the society of the capital, but to enliven the dullness of the provincial towns. He was, after Count Stephen Szechenyi, the most
influential person in promoting this institution, and was for some years its secretary, but relinquished the post to take that of one of the secretaries of the Hungarian Academy in 1831, of which he was alio a zealous promoter. Kohl, the traveller, bears testimony to the extraordinary influence of these establishments on the whole tone of society even in Hungarian villages, where they were imitated on a small scale. In 1837 Dobrentei received an intimation from the government that his holding the post of secretary to the Academy any longer would be incompatible with his official duties, and he then devoted himself to the editorship of his great work, the 'Regi Magyar Nyelveruldkek,' or ' Ancient Monuments of the Magyar Language,' the first volume of which, a substantial quarto, was published at Buda in 1825, and the fifth was in preparation at the time of Dobrentei's death. His labours on this work were the delight of his life, he pursued them with irrepressible ardour, and on the result his reputation rests securely. When he began hardly anything was known of the history of the Magyar language for centuries, and a subject that he found in darkness he left environed with light. He was indefatigable in dis covering the existence of old correspondence or documents in family archives; when he had once discovered them, he was no lees eager in obtaining permission to copy and make use of them, and he was not a man to take easily a refusal. By this combination of qualities he amassed a quantity of materials which nobody before him had ever supposed to exist, and he made anch good use of them that the works of subsequent authors are full of constant references to Debrentei's Nyelveroldkek,' which has become one of the principal monuments of Hungarian literature. How the revolution of 1848 affected him we have not eeen stated, but it is well known that his friend and fellow promoter of progress, Count Stephen Szechdoyi, became a maniacs Dobrentei was still engaged in collecting materials for his great work when surprised by death on the 27th of March 1851, at the age of 65. He was the anther of numerous lives of Hungarian worthies both in the periodicals to which he contributed and in the 'Esmeretch Mrs,' or Hungarian translation of the Leipsic Conversations-Lexikon: with original additions to the Hungarian articles, and in editions of Berz senyi and other authors published under his superintendence, but no extended account of himself appears to have been published since his death.