flowers of life, with which a kind
Creator has adorned this earth. But almost all the other Reformers
were led, either by a one-sided zeal or by circumstances, to show
themselves decidedly opposed to the cultivation of elegant literature
and the fine arts; they destroyed or banished pictures, music,
statuary, and every thing which they could in any way regard as
worldly temptations to allure men from the only source of truth and
knowledge; nay, they sometimes went so far as to look at science and
art in themselves only in the light of handmaids to religion; and to
deem a devotion to them without such reference, as sinful worldliness.
Of such narrowness we do not find a trace in the fathers of the
Bohemian Reformation, who were themselves men of high intellectual
cultivation; and even their most zealous followers kept themselves
nearly free from it. If, as we have seen in the preceding period,
political, poetical, and religious subjects were merged in each other,
it was only the necessary result of the confusion occasioned by the
struggles of the time. Where one object is predominant, all others
must naturally become subordinate; but wherever that which appears
amiable only as the free tendency of the whole soul, is exacted as a
duty, a spiritual despotism is to be feared; of which we find very
little in the history of Bohemian literature. The classics never were
studied with more attention and devotion, were never imitated with
more taste. Italy, the cradle of fine arts, and then the seat of
general cultivation, was never visited more frequently by the Bohemian
nobility, than when three-fourths of the nation adhered to the
Protestant Church. At the very time, too, when the Bohemian
Protestants had to watch most closely their religious liberties, and
to defend them against the encroachments of a treacherous court, they
did not deem it a desertion of the cause of religion to unite with the
same Romanists, whose theological doctrines they contested, in their
labours in the fields of philology, astronomy, and natural philosophy.

The extent of the Bohemian national literature increased during the
sixteenth century so rapidly; the number of writers augmented so
prodigiously; and the opportunities for literary cultivation presented
to the reading public, by the multiplication of books through the
press, became so frequent; that the difficulty of giving a condensed
yet distinct picture of the time is greatly augmented. A sket