When, many years ago now, the once potent and extensive kingdom of
Bohemia gradually dissolved and passed away, not a few historians were
found to chronicle its past glories; and some have gone on to tell the
fate of this or that once powerful chieftain who either donned the
swallow-tail and conformed or, proudly self-exiled, sought some quiet
retreat and died as he had lived, a Bohemian. But these were of the
princes of the land. To the people, the villeins, the common rank and
file, does no interest attach? Did they waste and pine, anæmic, in
thin, strange, unwonted air? Or sit at the table of the scornful and
learn, with Dante, how salt was alien bread? It is of one of those
faithful commons I would speak, narrating only “the short and simple
annals of the poor.”
It is to be noted that the kingdom aforesaid was not so much a kingdom
as a United States—a collection of self-ruling guilds, municipalities,
or republics, bound together by a common method of viewing life. “There
_once_ was a king of Bohemia”—but that was a long time ago, and even
Corporal Trim was not certain in whose reign it was. These small free
States, then, broke up gradually, from various causes and with varying
speed; and I think ours was one of the last to go.
With us, as with many others, it was a case of lost leaders. “Just for
a handful of silver he left us”; though it was not exactly that, but
rather that, having got the handful of silver, they wanted a wider
horizon to fling it about under than Bloomsbury afforded.