Page:The Queens Court Manuscript with Other Ancient Bohemian Poems, 1852, Cambridge edition.djvu/25

Rh The contrast between the poems of the Queen’s Court Manuscript, and the artificial compositions of the learned poëts contained in P. Hanka’s and other collections, is so strong, and their similarity to both the ancient and modern effusions of the kindred Servians, Bulgarians and Little-russians, so great, that no one can hesitate to refer them to the class of natural or popular, in contradistinction to that of scholastic or artificial poetry. The rhymed epic fragments, the Alexandreis, and other ancient Bohemian poems differ from them as much as night from day, though some of them are contemporary with, or even older than, the latest of those contained in the Queen’s Court Manuscript.

As regards the historical value of these poems, there is but little to remark. Who would learn the real history of the Trojan war from the Iliad, or of the Servian war of freedom from poems about George Petrovicz and Milosz Obrenovicz? Nay, the honest Russian Chronicler Nestor confesses that he found the most contradictory legends about his hero Kyj. What such poems (like the novels of later times) can and do furnish, is an exact picture of the life and feelings of the days in which they were written, a mirror in which our dead ancestors yet live and move before us.