ohemians 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.

They now wer