was republished in 1818 it appeared almost a new work. The book has become somewhat antiquated and incomplete, as so many Bohemian books have been rediscovered since it appeared, but it still has considerable value. While these and other works of Dobrovský were written in German, he employed the Latin language for his Institutiones Linguæ Slavicæ Veteris. In this, his most important work, Dobrovský, as in his grammar, paved the way for later workers. The Institutiones have been the foundation of the work of the many important Slav philologists of the present century.
It has already been mentioned that Dobrovský had no enthusiasm for the Bohemian language, to the development of which he so largely contributed. His early recollections carried him back to the time when it was little more than an idiom used by the peasantry in the outlying country districts of Bohemia. When, in the present century, the movement in favour of the national language acquired greater strength, Dobrovský never sympathised with it. When the publication of the Časopis Musea Království Českého ("Journal of the Museum of the Kingdom of Bohemia") in Bohemian, as well as in German, was first discussed, Dobrovský expressed the wish that the new journal should appear in German only. It must, in justice to Dobrovský, be added that in the last years of his life he wrote a few Bohemian essays for the journal. They are, indeed, with a collection of letters, the only writings in the national language which he has left. Dobrovský's critical nature and his thorough philological training induced him to deny from the time of its discovery the genuineness of the "MS. of Grüneberg,"[1] an opinion
- ↑ See Chapter I.
