Page:An Anthology of Modern Bohemian Poetry.pdf/12



in the year 1832 Sir John Bowring issued his "Cheskian Anthology," modern Bohemian poetry was in its infancy. The language, which had long struggled for a mere precarious existence, had been overhauled and improved. For years it had been persistently ignored by the nobility of Bohemia—alien families whose authority dated from the Thirty Years' War. It had been banished to obscure rural districts, preserved in the mouths of illiterate peasants, and was in danger of extinction as a literary language, when, in the second half of the eighteenth century,