In the autumn of 1518 the agent of a Leipzig bookseller trading to Prague received a letter to carry back with him and forward on to Erasmus at Louvain.  The writer was a certain Jan Slechta, a Bohemian country gentleman, who was living at Kosteletz on the upper waters of the Elbe, a few miles to the North-east of Prague.  He was a man of education and position.  After taking his M.A. at Prague in 1484, he had served for sixteen years as a secretary to King Ladislas of Bohemia and Hungary; but about 1507, disgusted with the turmoils of court life in that very troubled time, he had retired to his home, to give his later years to the education of his son and the personal management of his estates.  The world of affairs had not extinguished his love of learning.  He was an intimate friend of Bohuslaus of Hassenstein, scholar and traveller, and corresponded with him in elegant Latin.  Attracted by the reputation for eloquence won by the notorious Hieronymus Balbus, he had persuaded him c. 1499 to come and teach in Prague—­a step which in view of Balbus’ bad life he afterwards deeply regretted.  He was also the author of a dialogue on the relations of body and soul, entitled Microcosmus; which with characteristic modesty he kept for more than twenty years known only to his intimate friends—­indeed it was only in the last year of his life that he composed a dedication for it, and it seems never to have been printed.

The tone of Slechta’s thoughts in his later years was grave and serious; as well it might be.  The two kingdoms, then but loosely united, were torn with internal factions and racial jealousies; while in church towers and over city gates the bells hung ready to proclaim to the countryside the advent of that ever-present menace, the Turk.  In the priesthood men could mark much that was amiss; and the seamless robe of Christ was rent with schism, the candle that Hus and Jerome had lighted a century before, still burning clearly among less sober heresies, which drew down on it, as upon themselves, spasmodic outbursts of retributive violence.  Uneasy sat the crown on Ladislas’ head; and when Death, coming as a friend, took it from him in 1516, it was only to thrust this sad office upon a ten-year-old boy, who after ten more years of childish government was miserably to perish at Mohacz.  No wonder that Slechta and his friends looked anxiously upon the future.  ’The times of Hus and Wycliffe which our grandfathers detested, seem golden beside our own’ wrote Bohuslaus to Geiler of Kaisersberg—­a member of that grave circle of Strasburg humanists, with which, it may be noted in passing, our Bohemians had much in common.  The letters of Slechta contain two disquisitions, one on the frailties of a celibate clergy, the other on the duties of a parish priest; advocating reforms by which he hoped to check the continuous growth of ‘those unutterable heretics, the Pyghards’:  by whom he meant the Bohemian Brethren.