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Though the battle of the white mountain, in 1620, was immediately fatal only to the reformers of Bohemia, yet its consequences were terrible to the whole bohemian people. Civil war in its worst shapes 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 proscriptious, exiles, flights, and sufferings, 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 an equal, undistinguishing malediction pursued every thing which bore a slavonian character. And long did the stigma of heresy attach to the productions of the bohemian press, so that works which had been published under the accustomed ecclesiastical sanction, were banished and banned by the Indices of 1729, 1749, and even as late as 1767. Nay, the work of a romish pope (the chronicle of Æneas Sylvius), and which appeared under the sanction
