Page:Lectures on The Historians of Bohemia by Count Lutzow (1905).djvu/13



MONG the many greater and smaller misfortunes that have befallen the Bohemian nation the misuse of the national name is by no means the one that is of least account. A Bohemian requires a thorough knowledge of the English language to grasp what the word ‘Bohemian’ generally conveys to Englishmen. The ancient mistake which identified the Bohemians with the gipsies undoubtedly originated in France. As the great Bohemian historian Palacky has suggested, many gipsies arrived in France bearing passports signed by the Bohemian kings, and this was the original cause of the mistake. The peculiar, modern signification of the word is, however, I think, a creation of Henry Murger, and owes its origin to his Vie de Bohême. Thackeray first used the word in its modern sense in the English language.

It is at the present day, I hope, scarcely necessary to state that the Bohemians have no connexion whatever with the gipsies, and that their language, a Slavic one, forms part of the great Aryan family of speech. Next to Russia, which in literature as in politics is the most prominent of Slav countries, and Poland, Bohemia is the country in which Slavic literature has flourished most; and in Bohemian literature historians certainly hold a very high rank. The reason is not difficult to seek. There was a period when the Bohemians were makers as well as writers of history, and it has been the