Page:Bohemian poems, ancient and modern (Lyra czecho-slovanska).djvu/28

xxiv carefully concealed from the people, not only the learned labours of our ancestors, but even their very names. None of what the learned and patriotic Balbin had collected and compiled about the ancient literature of Bohemia, could be published before the abolition of their order, because they took care not to communicate his manuscript to anybody.

‘The Bohemians changed then even their national dress and gradually adopted their present costume. I must also remark that since that time the history of the Bohemians ends, and that of other nations in Bohemia begins .’

Yet it was not the will of God to suffer the nation to perish entirely; no sooner was what seemed the deathblow given to the Czeskish language, than a reaction commenced, and the ancestral spirit began to reanimate the long prostrate corpse of the Czeskish