much political information could be obtained by listening to the conversation at the dinner-table. The Protestants frequently accused the Catholics of employing servants as spies on such occasions.[1] Whatever Slavata's authority may be, the passage describing the Bohemian leaders as cringing in a servile fashion before the representative of the enemy of Christianity, while displaying blind and brutal hatred of the House of Habsburg, is a masterpiece of skilful animosity.
The composition of these memoirs seems to have inspired Slavata with a taste for historical studies. In the last years of his life he wrote a vast history of all the lands ruled by the House of Habsburg, from the reign of Ferdinand I. to Slavata's own time. This book, entitled Historické Spisovani ("Historical Works"), consists of fourteen volumes, and the earlier memoirs were incorporated with it, forming (of course not in chronological order) volumes i. and ii. The work includes a lengthy treatise on the long-disputed question whether the Bohemian kingdom was an elective or a hereditary one, a question which the battle of the White Mountain settled "by blood and iron." Slavata here displays a considerable amount of erudition, though the arguments founded on his accounts of the reigns of the almost entirely mythical early Přemyslide princes are, of course, valueless. Generally speaking, Slavata's record of earlier events, based principally on such doubtful authorities as Ænæas Sylvius and Hajek, do not possess the historical value which undoubtedly belongs to his personal recollections.
- ↑ Readers of Schiller's Wallenstein will remember the scene at the banquet at Pilsen (Die Piccolomini, act iv. scene 5), when the servants are listening to the conversation of the generals.
