Page:The Queens Court Manuscript with Other Ancient Bohemian Poems, 1852, Cambridge edition.djvu/23

Rh celebrated in Bohemia by both contemporaries and posterity as a poet, though none of his works are now extant; and that the beautiful manuscript was prepared for Queen Kunigunda herself. From palæographical tokens the Abbé Dobrowsky placed the collection between the years 1290 and 1310; the historian Palacky, taking other considerations also into account, regards the manuscript as written between 1280 and 1290, but not earlier.

Out of the whole collection fortune has preserved but a small portion, namely part of the 25th, the whole of the 26th and 27th, and part of the 28th chapters. It is thus easy to calculate the greatness of the loss that Slavonic literature has sustained in the destruction of the greater part of the collection. It may be that this was not the only collection of the kind in Bohemia, and in fact other discoveries of a similar kind, though of less extent, give indications to this effect. An incomplete leaf of parchment, discovered in 1823 by P. J. Zimmermann, and taken off the cover of another old manuscript, contains, besides “King Vaceslaw I.’s Song of Love,” “the Stag,” which appears also in the Queen’s Court Manuscript. This fragment Dobrowsky places before 1250, Palacky between 1230 and 1250. Unfortunately several similar scraps were carried away by