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308 him are often apparent. Cosmas and Dalimil related the legends and traditions of their land just as they had reached them from the earliest available oral or written depositions. Hajek, on the contrary, always assumes the part of a conscientious and systematic historian. He indeed mentions Tacitus, Ptolemy, Strabo, Orosius, and a limited number of mediæval writers among the authorities whom, according to his statement, he had consulted. Hajek's object was to join together various, often contradictory, tales, and to give them the shape of a chronologically consistent record of the lives of the Premyslide princes. Was it for this purpose necessary to alter traditional dates? That appeared to Hajek a matter of no great importance!

Writing as a fervent partisan of Rome, Hajek of course judges Hus and Jerome of Prague severely. Of the latter he tells us: "In 1400 there arrived in Prague, coming from England, a young man who had gone there for the purposes of study, Jerome by name, a citizen of the new town of Prague, the son of one Albert (Vojtěch). . . . This Jerome had brought books with him from England, into which he had copied out some of the writings of 'John the Englishman,' whom they call Wycliffe. This man had by his teaching corrupted first a town in England called 'Oksa' or 'Oksonia,' and afterwards the whole English kingdom." Of Hus, Hajek tells us that he was originally a good and pious man, but that he came under the influence of two Englishmen, "Jacob the Bachelor" and "Conrad of Kandelburgk" (=Canterbury). These men used to visit (according to Hajek!) the young masters of the university, spreading Wycliffe's teaching and perverting many from the true faith. At last "Master John of