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 the French fashion, but all the smaller nations, who had almost forgotten of their historical existence, began to discover themselves. If the popular creation was truer and more important than the traditional literatures of the Græco-Roman type, then Serbia and Bohemia and Russia, which had preserved an enormous mass of oral literature in out-of-the-way places, harked back to important pasts and should develop from within. The nationalistic idea began to grow out of proportion to the folklore which could conveniently be mustered in proof of native superiority, and where there was such a disproportion it became necessary, so unscrupulous nationalists thought, to manufacture such material. Everybody knows the huge literary forgery of Macpherson, whose Ossianic poetry none the less had a great influence upon susceptible minds, even in the East. Another such forgery was that of the Bohemian Hanka, whose Queen’s Court Manuscript still finds overzealous defenders among a certain class of unwise nationalists. It is not the forgery of Hanka which has had most widespread influences upon the dissemination of the nationalistic idea among the Slavs, but the legitimate and scholarly activity of the father of Slavic philology, Joseph Dobrovský.

Having studied Eastern languages at the University of Prague, he had hoped to become a mis-