Page:A history of Bohemian literature.pdf/196

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BOHUSLAV OF LOBKOVIC
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This parody Všehrd communicated to Domoslav, who—it is difficult to understand from what motive, unless it was sheer love of mischief-making—immediately forwarded it to Lobkovic.

The indignation of Lobkovic was very great, and he expressed it in a lengthy very Ciceronian letter to Domoslav, which is contained in Professor Truhlar's collection of the letters of Lobkovic. He regrets that Domoslav should have sent to him "the blasphemies of one who, with sacrilegious mouth, raves against the Church of Christ."[1] Lobkovic then proceeds to compare his former friend to Dathan and Abiram, Wycliffe, Arius, and the Emperor Julian. After a long and tedious polemical discourse, Lobkovic very characteristically ends his letter by stating that the heretic, besides his other misdeeds, had "placed a tribrachys in the fifth place of his first verse;" a lengthy list of similar errors follows, and concludes with the remark that Všehrd had, at the end of the last line of his poem, used the second syllable of the word "papalibus"—in the passage I have quoted—as long, contrary to what he had done in an earlier passage of the poem.

In his later years Lobkovic spent most of his time at his castle of Hassištein, and does not seem to have continued his attempt to obtain political influence. He collected a large library at his castle, and devoted his time to study and to the company of the humanist friends who visited him at Hassištein. He died there in 1512.

As Lobkovic wrote only in Latin, a writer on Bohemian literature can deal with his works very briefly. The fact that a Bohemian noble of high rank wrote in a

  1. "Blasphemias cuiusdam in ecclesiam Dei ore sacrilego debacchantis."