Page:Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz (1862).djvu/14

 books, the first of which treats of the journey to, the second the residence at, Constantinople, the third gives an account of the captivity of the author and his companions, and the fourth of their deliverance and return. It is rarely that a mere boy has gone through so much for the sake of his religion, and still more rarely does it occur that so great a sufferer is able to give so clear and graphic an account of his own misfortunes, and those of others. The first book appears to have been taken from a journal actually sent home to the writer’s family, and afterwards interspersed with anecdotes and digressions on Turkish life and manners; the rest were manifestly written from a very vivid, and often very painful, recollection of the scenes which they describe. It will, perhaps, be some additional recommendation to Baron Wratislaw’s work to mention, at the outset, that the ambassadors of Queen Elizabeth of England, and Henry IV. of France, whose names I find, from Von Hammer, to have been respectively Edward Burton, and M. de Brèves, took a prominent part in the liberation of the captives; and that it was to the Christian friendship of the former that they were in debted for their eventual escape through Hungary. An account of the embassy was also written in German by the apothecary, Frederic Seidel, but I have been unable to obtain a copy of it.

The Czesko-Slavonic or Bohemian language is spoken by the race inhabiting Bohemia watered by the Elbe, or Labe, and the Moldau, or Veltava; Moravia, watered by the March, or Morava,—and Slovakia, or the district of the Slovaks, in the north of Hungary. It is altogether spoken by about eight millions of people. It differs from the Polish in not having retained the nasal sounds of a and e, which connect the objective case feminine, in Polish, with the am and em of the Latin accusative. In Polish, also, the