of Luxemburg, and thus became several times united with the Roman imperial crown.  Under the emperor Charles IV, Bohemia rose to the summit of its lustre.  It was he who founded, A.D. 1348, the university of Prague, the first Slavic institution of that description.[8] Under his successor, Wenceslaus, the war of the Hussites began.  In the year 1457. the Bohemians maintained their right of election by placing George Podiebrad, a Bohemian, on the throne.  The wisdom and equity of this individual justified their choice.  In A.D. 1527, Ferdinand I, archduke of Austria, was elected king; and from that time the Bohemians have never again been able to detach themselves from Austria; with the exception of a short interval, during which the unfortunate palatine Frederic, known in the history of the thirty years’ war, was placed on their throne.  During the fifteenth, sixteenth, and the first half of the seventeenth, centuries.  Bohemia was almost without interruption the theatre of bloody wars and contests in behalf of their religious liberties.  Then came the awful stillness of death, which reigned for more than a hundred years over this exhausted and agonized country.  For its revival and its present comparatively flourishing condition, it is indebted to its own rich natural resources, and to the wiser policy and milder dispositions of the more recent Austrian sovereigns.

The Bohemian language is the common property not only of the Bohemians and the Moravians, constituting together about three and a half millions in number, but also of nearly two millions of Slovaks, those venerable remains of the ancient Slavic settlements between the Carpathian mountains and the rivers Theiss and Danube.  This people, so nearly related to the Czekhes, occupy the whole north-western part of Hungary; and are, besides this, scattered over that whole kingdom.  They speak indeed a dialect or rather several dialects essentially different from the language spoken in Bohemia and Moravia; but the circumstance of their having, since the Reformation, chosen the Bohemian for their literary language, amalgamates their contributions to literature with those of the Bohemians, and gives them an equal right to the productions of these latter.

Of all the modern Slavic languages, the Bohemian was the first cultivated.  Two bishops of Merscburg, Boso towards the middle of the tenth century, and Werner at the close of the eleventh, as also fifty years later another German priest, Bruno, were above all active in promoting the holy cause of Christianity by religious instruction.  The application of Latin characters to Slavic words had long been familiar to the German priesthood; inasmuch as very early attempts had been made to convert the subjugated Slavic tribes, scattered through the north of Germany.