long ago. Both Otakar and Otto, and some other German princes have accused me of excessive hostility to the Premysl dynasty. They have declared that Hungary should yet suffer, and be abandoned in her extremity, by reason of my assault on an elector of the empire. Yet Otakar wasa hero and a saint compared with the contemptible conspirator who now nominally rules at Prague.
“I am tempted to ask myself whether we shall next be threatened with eternal torment, and an anathema and an interdict, if we attempt to teach honor to princes, and instruct rulers in the common principles of truth and of hospitality. Not enough is it that our sick bodies suffer without relief, but now the fundamental sentiments of sincerity and good faith, even between kings and knights, are avowedly abrogated at the bidding of the pretended ministers of the altar. Must we suffer anathema if we disavow all such perversions of human sentiment, and demand that a man shall be a man, with the essential feelings of a man, and not an avenging, cunning beast of prey? And it is against my sister, too, that all this treachery has been aimed.
“It is a new Bohemia we have to deal with. It is a Bohemia corrupted with a strange craftiness, and an imported spirit of deceit, of mental reservation, and of malice. The open ambition of Otakar was a menace, manly of its kind; but the deceitful and dishonorable artifices of Wenzel and his court threaten us with an invasion infinitely more insidious and cankerous.”
