The Yellow Rose — Maurus Jokai / Mor Jokai

Mór Jókai was an arch-romantic, with an almost Oriental imagination, and humour of the purest, rarest description. If one can imagine a combination, in almost equal parts, of Walter Scott, William Beckford, Dumas père, and Charles Dickens, together with a strong hint of Hungarian patriotism, one may perhaps form a fair idea of the character of the work of this great Hungarian romancer. Jókai was extremely prolific. It was to literature that he continued to devote most of his time, and his productiveness after 1870 was stupendous, amounting to some hundreds of volumes. Stranger still, none of this work is slipshod, and the best of it deserves to endure.