Page:Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz (1862).djvu/15

 accent falls almost invariably on the penultimate; in Bohemian on the first syllable of every word. Bohemian is connected with Greek by possessing prosodiacal quantity, i. e. long and short vowels, independently of accent—a peculiarity which has been lost by every Slavonic dialect except the Servian, and in that it is said to be far less distinct than in the Bohemian. All the Slavonic dialects agree in retaining the locative case, which appears occasionally in Greek, and in Latin is found only in the names of places, and in some few other words, as humi, domi, ruri. They also agree in a use of the instrumental case almost exactly corresponding to that which is commonly called the dativus propositi, but which would be far more properly designated the idiomatic dative of the predicate in Latin, being simply an occasional artifice to distinguish the predicate from the subject, when both are substantives, in the absence of an article, of which the uncorrupted Slavonic dialects are equally destitute with the Latin and early Greek.

The early history of Bohemia is very mythological, and has been well treated, for the first time, in a philosophical spirit, by the historian Francis Palacky. During great part of the ninth century Moravia was the seat of government of a powerful kingdom, whose prince, Moymir, became a Christian. In 844 fourteen Bohemian Lechs, or lords, determined to embrace Christianity, betook themselves to King Louis the German at Ratisbon, and were solemnly baptized on the 1st of January, 845. But the principal glory of the conversion of the Slavonians belongs to Cyrillus and Methodius, the sons of the patrician Leo of Thessalonica, a town then inhabited by a half Greek, half Slavonic population. Rastislaw of Moravia heard of the conversion of the Bulgarian monarch. Boris, by the younger of the two brothers, Methodius, and sent, in 862, an embassy to