Page:The Queens Court Manuscript with Other Ancient Bohemian Poems, 1852, Cambridge edition.djvu/24

xii the wind as the discoverer was carelessly drying them by an open window.

Historical notices of each of the poems will be found attached to them as foot notes below, I shall therefore add but a few prefatory observations upon them. With respect to the sixth poem in the collection, “Zaboi, Slavoi and Ludiek,” Szafarzik remarks, that the lay has probably scarcely come down to us in its original form, and that before it was reduced to writing a good many phrases may have passed from the particular to the general, and a good many marks of time and place have perished. Moreover in those early times the empire of the Bohemian language was much more extensive than it is at present, viz. on the one side deep into Austria and Bavaria, on the other into Thuringia, Meissen, Lusatia, and Silesia; and that the event celebrated in the poem may have happened in a country, where the Czeskish language was spoken, though not in the immediate dominions of the dukes of Prague or Bohemia. I may add that an instance of such a transplantation occurs in our own literature. The Welsh poem translated by Gray, “The Death of Hoel,” records the destruction of the British inhabitants of Edinburgh by the Saxons of Deiria or Northumberland.