Page:The Queens Court Manuscript with Other Ancient Bohemian Poems, 1852, Cambridge edition.djvu/13



value and significance of the ties and feelings of different nationalities acquired new prominence and importance in and through the wasting wars which resulted from the French Revolution of 1792. All men of higher education and deeper insight appeared after the pacification of the continent of Europe by the Congress of Vienna, to feel a new and lively zeal for the interests of their country awakened within them. The Austrian empire was not devoid of this common patriotic feeling, and it was with especial vivacity that it thrilled through every vein in a country ever susceptible of the impulses of an active intellectual life, the country of Bohemia. Hence arose one of Bohemia’s noblest Institutions, the National Museum, which, after long preparation, was in 1818 founded through the instrumentality of Count Franz Anton Kolowrat-Liebsteinsky, then Oberstburg-graf of Bohemia, and provisionally organized by Counts Caspar and Francis Sternberg and Francis Klebelsberg, and 3em