This is how László Cs. Szabó, a leading Hungarian intellectual of the mid- twentieth century,2 starts his article ‘Milton or Czuczor’. Cs. Szabó refused the request to write only of ‘Hungarian things’, but the suggestion that he should give preference to the works of Gergely Czuczor, a Hungarian lexi-cographer and minor poet of the nineteenth century, to those of Milton and ‘the …