Page:Bohemian legends and other poems.djvu/10

tendency, if it were but in the detested Bohemian tongue, and one Jesuit boasted on his death-bed that he had destroyed with his own hands no less than sixty thousand volumes in that language.” I would also mention a very valuable collection of translations made from the Bohemian by the celebrated English linguist, Dr. John Bowring (Výbor z básnictví Českého, Cheskian Anthology). Being a history of the poetical literature of Bohemia, with translations by Dr. John Bowring (London, 1832: Rowland Hunter). He also in his introduction explains why Bohemia has so little literature, and also, in a way, why it never can have. Writing of the battle of Bílá Hora, he says: “Though the battle of the White Mountain, in 1620, was fatal only to the reformers of Bohemia, yet its consequences were terrible to the whole Bohemian people. Civil war in its worse shape devastated the land, and so fierce were its visitations that the Jesuit Balbin, in one of his letters, expresses his surprise that after so many proscriptions, exiles, flights, and suffering, a single inhabitant should remain. The language of Bohemia was abandoned—its literature fell into decay. The taint of heresy had so deeply stained the works of more than two centuries, that they were all recklessly condemned to the flames. Banishment was the portion of the most illustrious among the Bohemians, and equal, undistinguishing malediction pursued everything which bore a Slavonian character. Legends of the saints, trumpery discussions about trumpery dogmas and all those streams of pitiful and useless learning, in which civil and religious despotism seek to engage and exhaust inquiry, were poured over Bohemia.” * * * “An ingenuous criticism on the popular poetry of the Bohemians may be seen in the Prague Monthly Periodical (August, 1827), written by M. Müller, the aesthetic professor, in that capital. There is truth in the observa-