Page:Gregor The story of Bohemia.pdf/477

 “Paradise Lost” was a vindication of the richness and flexibility of the Bohemian tongue. Jungman further did an inestimable service to his country by writing a dictionary, a work so scholarly, so exhaustive, that one can not but marvel how a single individual could ever have accomplished so prodigious a task, even though a lifetime were devoted to the work.

In 1817 the country was thrown into a furor of excitement by the discovery of some ancient specimens of Bohemian literature, known as the Kralodvorský rukopis (Queen’s Court Manuscript). This was a collection of poems, written on twelve pieces of parchment, and supposed to date back as far as the thirteenth century. Some time after this, another manuscript was discovered at Green Mountain, and hence called Zelenohorský rukopis (Green Mountain Manuscript), the writings of which date back to the ninth century. Although the authenticity of these manuscripts has been hotly contested, they exerted a powerful influence upon the development of the national literature. People began to appreciate a language that, at so early a period, had reached such a high degree of development as to be used in the construction of poems of so much literary merit.