the terror, they were able to treasure and hand down from father to son.
MODERN PERIOD
RENAISSANCE
The modern period of Czech and Slovak lterature divides itself automatically with the history of the nation into two natural groupings:
1. The literature of the national renaissance, from the close of the eighteenth century to 1848. This in turn, is subdivided into the period of enlightenment (1780–1815) and the period of romanticism (1815–1848).
2. The literature of the revivified nation, from 1848 to the present day.
The retrogression, in a national sense, brought about by Maria Theresa and Joseph II. in the wholesale introduction of the German language in place of the vernacular was counteracted, in a sense, by the truly great social, economic and religious reforms which were brought about by the enactments: in 1774 of a law organizing public schools; in 1775 of the annulment of serfdom and of feudalism; in 1781 by the passing of the Toleration Patent permitting religious freedom.
Almost immediately scientific and literary organizations and writers sprang up in Bohemia and among the Slovaks. The efforts of Joseph II. at centralization in the Hapsburg Empire by means of the exclusive use of the German without recognition of the language of the
