Page:The Queens Court Manuscript with Other Ancient Bohemian Poems, 1852, Cambridge edition.djvu/22

x continuity and without punctuation. Contrary to the usage in Latin and Greek Manuscripts, which are often hopelessly overloaded with abbreviations, in this, as in other Bohemian Manuscripts of that time, there appear but few, and those universally known and current abbreviations; the text is written with evident diligence and extreme correctness, and the hand of contemporary emendation shews itself in but few and those by no means questionable places; it is therefore easily legible to those acquainted with ancient handwriting, and happily little or no room is left for conjectural criticism. The specific character of the writing, or the peculiar mode of forming particular letters, of uniting two in one, and introducing abbreviations, is entirely Bohemian, and the manuscript was unquestionably written in Bohemia and by a Bohemian. The discoverer of the fragment expressed immediately in the first edition, and P. Palacky has supported, both in periodical publications and in his history of Bohemia, with various weighty reasons, the conjecture that the collection of poems was made or caused to be made by Zavisz of Rosenberg, the husband of Przemysl Otakar the Second’s widow, Queen Kunigunda, a man most distinguished for intellect and accomplishments, and at the end of his life for misfortune, and who was