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368

A HISTORY OF BOHEMIAN LITERATURE

and ploughers,! soldiers (who give it me welP), and other ruffians oppress me ; on the other hand, I have little hope of obtaining my object (which, between us, is to obtain the professorship of physics at the University of Prague), because of the fearful number of competitors, and also because of the injustice of the- Austrian Government, which recently transferred to Prague three professors from Vienna, as if we Bohemians were all donkeys." . . . The passage of the Russian army through Bohemia naturally greatly interested the Slavic enthusiasts. On September 24, 1813, Jungmann writes to Marek: "The Russian troops march through here (LeitTo-day 120,000 (?) are expected, meritz) constantly. whose passage will cost the town 9000 florins. I diligently govorju [Russian for talking] with them, and find that there are among them very good-natured men, and that that which is —-principally by Germans — said of their stealing and robbing is not their fault, but that of the badly organised commissariat. . . . On the whole, they are not worse than our own soldiers. It will not be to the disadvantage of the Bohemians that they should become better acquainted with the Russians. They will at least know that there are more Slavs in the world than they fancied." On May 4, 1814, Jungmann writes to Marek : " The Germans and half-Germans here" (at Leitmeritz) "are very angry with the newspapers, because they always — so they say — mention the This war has Russians as if they were everything. been advantageous to the Slav world, and has contriNot in buted in no slight degree to its advancement. ' A proverbial Bohemian expression signifying " one and all."

In Bohemian, "Mi hodnfi mnoho davaji." The Bohemian colloquialism be literally translated by an English colloquial expression. here can ^