of the Bohemian writers, and since his time there has been a great reawakening of the national spirit, and the language which had sunk to be a despised dialect of the common people of the towns and the peasantry of the rural districts, now claims half of the University of Prague, has its seat in one of the finest theatres in Europe, and is once more the proud mouthpiece of art and science.
The writer, some of whose stories are here brought to the notice of the English reading public, was one of those who helped on the attainment of this proud result. Palacky and Jungmann aroused the interest of the people in their own history by publishing historical and antiquarian works in the vernacular. Cajetan Tyl is still remembered as a patriotic dramatist and writer of fiction, and Erben’s Slavonic folk-lore has a general interest, but none of the Bohemian writers has caught so speaking a likeness of the inner life of the Bohemian people as Viteslav Halek, no one is remembered with such enthusiastic affection by all classes, or strikes so responsive a chord in the feelings of high and low. Already throughout Bohemia societies have been formed for the reading of his works, although he has not been dead fifteen years, and when I lodged in Smichoff with an honest Bohemian stonemason and his wife, I found it difficult to keep their hands off my copy of his stories. The more cultivated classes admire him for the simplicity of his style, and even the Germans are constrained grudgingly to acknowledge his merits. A complete edition of his works has, indeed, been lately published in the original language edited by a writer, whom from his name (Ferdinand Schulz), I should judge to be a German.
These works consist of some half-dozen dramas drawn chiefly from Slavonic history. The first of these, Czarevic Alecsej, was acted about the year 1860, and is modelled to some extent on Goethe’s Egmont. For another, composed and brought out about the same time, Kral Rudolf, the author had the honour of a short imprisonment at the hands of the Austrian Government. Sergius Catiline, Zavis z Falkenštejna, Kral Vukasin (dealing with Serbian history), and Amnon and Tamar are the names of his other dramas. They are all tragedies, and somewhat heavy-reading. Amnon and Tamar, written in 1874, is the most powerful of them, but the subject is objectionable.
It is difficult for a foreigner with an imperfect knowledge of the language to judge correctly, but I should say that none of the other plays rise much above the level of Tennyson’s and Swinburne’s dramatic efforts. Most of them, however, are the work of the poet’s earlier years as a writer, and it is noteworthy that his latest works are far above those of a more youthful period, and this makes his somewhat premature death the more regrettable. These dramas fill two volumes.
Another volume is devoted to lyrical pieces, ballads, and romances, written at different times between 1854 and 1870. A few samples are
