of the romantic school, if we may be permitted to use that word. We call this class romantic to distinguish its writers from those of the national school,—that is, writers who choose their characters and subjects from the rich Bohemian history, past and present, whose works are pervaded by what we might call the national spirit. The most prominent among the living representatives of this class are. Svatopluk Čech, Alois Jirásek, Václav Vlček, and Karolina Světlá. The authors of the other category, on the contrary, picture simply men as such and not as members of a particular nationality. They work under the influences of modern times, which tend to rub off the peculiarities of different nations.
The author whom we are going to consider is eminently a writer of modern times. The ideas and doctrines that he promulgates are those of contemporaneous philosophy. It was only the inner excellency of his works that led us to present Jakub Arbes to the American public.
Arbes was born on the 12th of June, 1840, at Smíchov, a suburb of Prague, of poor parentage. The continual struggle of his family for existence and the early deaths of his brothers and sisters created and strengthened his earnest view of life, to which is due the gloomy coloring of many of his romances and novels, especially those dealing with the life of workingmen. His father, a shoemaker, originally decided that his son should pursue the vocation of his parent, but Jakub’s success in the school-room brought him first to a high school and then to a polytechnic. Here he devoted all his leisure to private studies of modern philosophy, esthetics, and foreign literatures. Leaving the school he was equipped with a great amount of knowledge, little of which, however, had practical value. Thus he missed all the advantages of practical life and entered upon the thorny path of a writer.
Queerly enough, Arbes began his literary career with a German poem (1855) and a German novelette (1856). But soon this German sickness left him, and Bohemian magazines found in him a zealous contributor. Books and articles written by him are numbered by hundreds. The great Bohemian encyclopedia of Otto, to which we owe our biographical and other data, mentions thirty of his princi-
