Page:Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz (1862).djvu/13



HE work to which I have come forward to ask the attention of the British public was written as long ago as 1599, and was then intended, apparently, only for private circulation. It was written in the Bohemian or Czesko-Slavonic language, by one who was perfect master of it, and the book itself is described by Jungmann, in his Historie Literatury Czeské, in the following words:—“The author relates his journey, and much about the manners and customs of the Turks in a natural, vigorous, pure, and manly style.” It remained in manuscript till 1777, when it was published by Pelzel at Prague, and a second edition was published by Kramerius in 1807. I have made my translation from the latter edition, and it will be found to differ very widely from the German translation of 1786, in which the translator, for instance, introduces a violent tirade against the celibacy of the clergy, not one word of which is in the printed Bohemian edition, which I possess; omits the pathetic and deeply pious peroration of the whole; and actually makes Mount Olivet, instead of Mount Olympus, visible from Constantinople. The work is divided into four