Page:Lectures on The Historians of Bohemia by Count Lutzow (1905).djvu/100

 tributed to the result that Bohemian again became a written language.

Francis Palacký, the most important of the Bohemian national leaders and the founder of the modern Bohemian historical school—to whom all who now attempt such studies must look up with reverence—was born on June 14, 1798, at Hodslavice in Moravia. His ancestors had belonged to the community of the Bohemian Brethren, and had indeed only nominally conformed to the Church of Rome, when after the battle of the White Mountain all religious freedom was suppressed in Moravia, as well as in Bohemia. The Emperor Joseph II indeed granted religious freedom to the members of the ‘Helvetic’ and ‘Augsburg’ confessions, as the adherents of Calvin and Luther were described by the ultramontane Austrian officials, but no mention was made of the ancient Bohemian Brotherhood. Palacký’s parents therefore declared themselves members of the Augsburg Church, which they believed to be nearest to their old traditional faith.

It is often noticeable in Palacký’s great historical work that the writer was brought up in the traditions of the Brotherhood, though he but seldom allows his personal sympathies to appear, and though he was also constantly embarrassed by the action of the Austrian government, which hardly permitted the publication of any statement adverse to the Church of Rome. Palacký’s father, a man of learning, gave him his first instruction, and he then continued his education at the Protestant school of Presburg in Hungary. In that town, situated in a Slavic part of Hungary, Palacký’s sympathies with the Slavic cause naturally became more intense. He here also first made the acquain-