nineteenth century. All national life was in abeyance. Bohemia was completely Germanized, bound hand and foot by the red tape of an indolent and brainless bureaucracy, by the intellectual and moral censorship of the Church, the Jesuits, and the police system.
Early in the nineteenth century a tiny group of Slav patriots was in the habit of meeting at intervals in the private room of an inn in Prague; and one of them, Rieger, remarked to his friends, “If the ceiling of this room were to fall and crush us, there would be an end of the national movement in Bohemia.” And this was scarcely an exaggeration; for in Bohemia, as in many other countries, a handful of idealists and theorists for the most part historical students and professors of literature—sowed the seed which a generation later was to awaken a whole race. The Society of the Bohemian Museum, founded in 1818, aimed at a revival of the national language; and it is worth noting that at first there was no feud with the Germans. Goethe was himself an honoured member, and the poets Lenau and Meissner wrote in honour of the Hussites. It was not until the Czech revival assumed an openly Slavophil form, that the enthusiasm of the Germans cooled down.
It is important to note that the Panslav movement, in its most ideal form, as an expression of the kinship and brotherhood of all the different Slavonic races, originated quite as much in Bohemia as in Russia. Its earliest mouthpiece,
