The instigators of these cruel acts, when they kindled the faggots by which these two martyrs died, did not anticipate that the fire they had lighted would spread over a whole country, and carry horror and devastation through the half of Germany.  The war by which the disciples of Huss avenged him, was one of the most bloody and destructive known in history.  The news of his death, when it reached Bohemia, touched the heart of every individual like an electric spark.  But this is not our province.  Keeping only our own object, the fate of the language and literature in view, we must refer the reader to the historical accounts of this distressing period, and limit ourselves to the mention of those events only, which had an immediate influence on these two topics.

Under the guidance of Nicholas of Hussineccz, the friend and patron of Huss, in whom even his enemies acknowledged more a defender of the Reformers, than a persecutor of the Catholics; of Zhizhka of Trocznow, a Bohemian knight of great valour, but disgraced by cruelty; and, after the death of these two, under Procopius, formerly a clergyman; the Hussites carried their victorious arms throughout all Bohemia, into Silesia, Franconia, Austria, and Saxony; and made these unhappy countries the theatre of the most cruel devastations.  If, divided into several parties, as they were, they were thus powerful, they would have been twice as strong, had they been united in the true spirit of Huss.  But even as early as A.D. 1421 dissensions arose among them; and they finally split into several sects and parties, who mutually hated each other even more than they did the Romanists.  Among these the Calixtins or Utraquists, whose principal object was to obtain the sacrament in both forms; and the Taborites, who insisted on a complete reform of the church; were the two principal.  The Calixtins comprehended the more moderate of the nobility and the wealthy citizens of Prague; between them and the Romanists a compact was concluded at Basle, in A.D. 1434, by which a conditional religious liberty was granted to them, and they acknowledged the emperor Sigismund as their sovereign; the weak king Wenceslaus having died in 1419.  The Taborites were unable to resist any longer the united power of both parties.  They partly dispersed; the rest united in the year 1457, in separate communities, and called themselves United Brethren.  Under the severest trials of oppression and persecution, the number of these congregations, the form of which was modelled after the primitive apostolic churches, rose in less than fifty years to two hundred.  In the middle of the sixteenth century, numerous emigrations to Prussia and Poland took place, where a free toleration was secured to them.  In the beginning of the seventeenth century, their communities in Bohemia were finally dissolved.  From the remnant of these persecuted Christians, who were called by the Germans, Bohemian or Moravian Brethren, has sprung the present community of United Brethren, often called in English, Moravians, which was founded at Hernhut in 1722, at first under the protection and ultimately under the patronage and direction of count Zinzendorf.