rulers. This was done with the notion that the brilliant period of Bohemian existence might be blotted out and forgotten. The book-destroyers that were turned loose in the land burned not only all historical and theological works, but every form of literary composition that might suggest to the Bohemian people their glorious past. One book-destroyer, an Austrian priest, boasted with pride that he had burned 60,000 Bohemian books. Many works were carried by the Bohemian exiles to Saxony, Slovakland, and other countries, and preserved; and these, together with others that escaped the fury of pillaging soldiers during the Thirty Years’ War, constitute the fragments out of which the literary history before the seventeenth century must be constructed. But these fragments are little more than the planks of a ship that was wrecked on the ocean of national vicissitude.
The modern Bohemian literary movement dates back only one hundred years. Joseph Dobrovský (1753–1829), the patriarch of Slavic philology, initiated the literary movement at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The few other Bohemian scholars of the day—Jungmann, Palacký, Kollár, Šafařík, and the incomparable publicist Charles Havlíček—lent their services to the rehabilitation of a national language that was long supposed to be dead. The letters of Jungmann
