to the Romanists and to the extreme or Taborite section of the Hussite party. As Palacký has pointed out in his note on Březov, that historian is often unfair to the Taborites, and this is the more to be regretted as all their own records have perished. He has to an undue extent impressed on the Taborite leaders the stigma of cruelty, though cruelties were committed by all parties during the Bohemian religious wars of the fifteenth century.
The introduction to the chronicle gives insight into the opinions and views of the prominent Bohemians during the period of the Hussite wars. Březov writes: ‘When I contemplate the present vast ruin and the calamities of the once happy and famed Bohemian kingdom, which is devastated and destroyed by the discord of internal strife, then my understanding becomes dull, and my mind bewildered by sorrow lacks the vigour of intellect; yet that the posterity of the Bohemian race may not lack a record of this terrible and indeed prodigious catastrophe, and may not through perverse idleness again encounter such or similar misfortunes moved also by the desire of preserving the memory of what I perceived with truthful eyes and ears, I have in the present pages recorded these facts in writing.’
Dr. Goll, whose introduction to his edition of Březov is a masterpiece of historical criticism, justly remarks that these words could not have been written during the glow of triumph that immediately followed the great Bohemian victories, but rather at a time when the evils of even successful civil war became apparent. Dr. Goll is, however, no doubt right in conjecturing that Březov took notes at the time of the events he described;
