BOHUSLAV

OF LOBKOVIC

179

This parody Vsehrd communicated to Domoslav, who

— it

is difficult to understand from what motive, unless it was sheer love of mischief-making — immediately for-

warded it to Lobkovic. The indignation of Lobkovic was very great, and he expressed it in a lengthy very Ciceronian letter to Domoslav, which is contained in Professor Truhlaf's collection of the letters of Lobkovic. He regrets that " Domoslav should have sent to him the blasphemies of one who, with sacrilegious mouth, raves against the Church of Christ." ^ Lobkovic then proceeds to compare his former friend to Dathan and Abiram, Wycliffe, Arius, and the Emperor Julian. After a long and tedious polemical discourse, Lobkovic veiy characteristically ends his letter by stating that the heretic, besides his other misdeeds, had " placed a tribrachys in the fifth place of " his first verse ; a lengthy Hst of similar errors follows, and concludes with the remark that Vsehrd had, at the end of the last line of his poem, used the second syllable " of the word " papalibus — in the passage I have quoted — as long, contrary to what he had done in an earlier passage of the poem. In his later yeai-s Lobkovic spent most of his time at his castle of Hassistein, and does not seem to have continued his attempt to obtain political influence. He collected a large library at his castle, and devoted his time to study and to the company of the humanist friends who visited him at Hassistein. He died there in 1512.

As Lobkovic wrote only in Latin,

a writer on Bohe-

mian literature can deal with his works very briefly. The fact that a Bohemian noble of high rank wrote in a '

" Blasphemias

cuiusdam in ecclesiam Dei ore sacrilego debacchantis.

"