Page:Lectures on The Historians of Bohemia by Count Lutzow (1905).djvu/26

 a manner which shows that the Roman amphitheatre was in his mind.

The chronicle of Cosmas for a long time enjoyed great popularity in Bohemia, and was indeed for many years the standard authority on the history of the country. It is, therefore, natural that it found many continuators, mostly ecclesiastics who wrote in Latin in a manner similar to that of Cosmas. Such historians were the writers known as the canon of the Vysehrad, the monk of Sazava, Peter abbot of Zittau, Francis provost of Prague, and many others. Their works have great interest for the student of Bohemian history, but speaking to a wider audience I do not wish to devote to them time that I should rather devote to historians of more general interest.

I should, however, give no faithful account of the historians of Bohemia if I omitted to allude to the so-called chronicle of Dalimil, the first historical work written in the national language. I should here mention that the late Mr. Wratislaw has given an account of Dalimil’s chronicle in one of his lectures on the native literature of Bohemia in the fourteenth century, which were delivered as the Ilchester Lectures for the year 1877; I have purposely avoided repeating statements contained in these lectures that will be known to most of those interested in Slavic matters.

It is doubtful who was the author of the chronicle of Dalimil, which has been preserved in several MSS., of which the most important is in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. It was formerly stated, on the authority of a passage in Hajek’s chronicle that was wrongly interpreted, that the book was the work of one ‘Dalimil, canon of the church of Boleslav.’ Recent