Page:Cheskian Anthology.pdf/88

 of the archbishop of Prague, was condemned by the inquisitorial spirit of the time. Not catholicism alone, but ultra-catholicism (as Dobrowsky remarks) was required from the unhappy bohemians, and the free inquiries and high aspirations of Hus, and Jerome, and Zižka were to be superseded by the debasements of the monkish spirit, and the fierce and barbarous ignorance of a persecuting priesthood. Legends and lives of the saints—trumpery discussions about trumpery dogmas—and all those streams of pitiful and useless learning, in which civil and religious despotism seek to engage and to exhaust inquiry, were poured over Bohemia. The only poetical work of this epoch entitled to attention, is the Zdoroslawjček (the proud nightingale) of Spee, translated into bohemian by Felix Kadlinsky, who died in 1675. A little before his death, Zywalda published a volume of "Rhymings" (Zběhnutj Ssederáse sedm lét. Prague, 1668), which are of little value.

The eighteenth century is very bare of bohemian productions. A few devotional works, and one volume of geometry, appeared, and all the rest (says Dobrowsky), is "want and poverty." The