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180 sense favourable to Rome at a time when almost the whole of his country was opposed to that Church, has caused Lobkovic to receive much exaggerated praise from writers whose literary judgment was guided by their political and religious sympathies. His works, both in prose and in poetry, are numerous, but have little value. Even in the best of his elegies he is far inferior to his contemporary Sannazaro. The Latinity of his letters is certainly very good, and he ranks very high among the humanists in this respect; but the elaborate style hardly dissimulates poverty of thought and narrow-minded prejudice. His letter or harangue to King Vladislav, written 1497, is in itself sufficient to convict Lobkovic of incapacity as a politician. The purpose of the letter was to entreat the king to re-establish the Roman Catholic archbishopric of Prague, but Lobkovic proceeds to beg the king to extirpate heresy in Bohemia entirely. He quotes, as examples for the king, Charles the Great, who forcibly converted the heathen Saxons, and Ferdinand of Arragon, "who alone among kings emulates you in virtue," by whose agency Baetica, the noblest province of Spain, was restored to our Christian fold. It is, of course, a matter of opinion whether the forcible reconversion of Bohemia to the Roman Church, such as actually took place in the seventeenth century, was desirable or not; but it requires but a very slight knowledge of Bohemian history to realise that such an attempt at the time of the reign of Vladislav was doomed to most certain failure. It is, however, possible that the letter was intended merely to be a rhetorical exercise.

The influence of Lobkovic on the development of Bohemian literature was undoubtedly harmful. The outspoken contempt for the national language expressed