Page:Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz (1862).djvu/44

 and all domestic instruction was strictly forbidden; no nonCatholic could make a valid will; and none but Catholic boys might be taken as apprentices. The Jesuits traversed the country with soldiers to protect them, in order to carry out these measures with the utmost severity. The poorer classes thus driven from their homes rose in rebellion, but were either cut to pieces on the spot, or taken prisoners, and then broken on the wheel, hung, beheaded, branded with redhot irons on the forehead, or deprived of their noses and ears. Nevertheless, many thousands fled into the forests, where they retained the faith of their fathers for a century and ahalf, till better times enabled them to profess it openly. In the autumn of 1627, Ferdinand came to Prague with his empress and son, and formally deprived the Bohemian Estates of all important rights and privileges, except that of granting supplies in the way of taxes, a right which they have never been permitted to exercise. More than 36,000 noble families left or were driven from Bohemia, and its conversion to Holy Mother Church was effected by the reduction of the number of its inhabitants from about 4,000,000 to about 800,000.

From this time forth Bohemia slept a deep and terrible sleep, and history is not concerned with the doings but the sufferings of the Bohemian people. Soon came the devastations of the thirty-years’ war to add themselves to the destruction of the national literature and suppression of the national intellect, which had been so eagerly pushed forwards by those “enemies of the human race,” the Jesuits.

The feelings of Bohemians towards this death-sleep of their country are very striking. Last summer I met a Bohemian gentleman who addressed me thus:—“Sir, you are come to visit a dead and buried and forgotten nation.” But a translation of the beautiful dedication of Erben’s “Kytice,” or