DOBROWSKY, JOSEPH, known as the patriarch of modern Bohemian literature, was the son of a Bohemian sergeant in an Austrian regiment of dragoons, and was born on the 17th of August 1753 at Gyarmat near Raab in Hungary, where the regiment was in quarters. His father's name was Daubrawsky, but the regimental chaplain, who was ignorant of Bohemian spelling, entered the child in the baptismal register as Dobrowsky, and this was ever afterwards recognised as his name. The boy did not learn the Bohemian language till he was ten years old, when he was sent to Deutschbrot for his education, and in after-life it was long before he took any particular interest in the subject. His taste for study made him adopt an eccle siastical life, and he entered the order of Jesuits in October 1772, only ten months before its dissolution, after which he prosecuted his studies at the university of Prague, and acquired some reputation for his knowledge of the oriental languages. He then became a tutor in the family of the Count von Nostitz, one of the great families of Bohemia, where he found as fellow-tutor Durich, the historian of Slavonic literature, and Pelzel, a noted miscellaneous writer, who WAS then engaged in compiling his 'Biographies of Bohemian and Moravian Authors and Artists,' in German and Latin, the book which, with Balbinus's 'Bohemia Docta,' has been the source of most that is in circulation on the Bohemian worthies. Pelzel requested Dobrowsky to assist him in collecting particulars for some of his biographies, and Dobrowsky, who had a most tenacious memory, became by this means so versed in a short time in the minutiae of the subject, that he warmed more and more into interest for it, and it finally became the business of his life. It may be remarked that Dobrowsky subse quently wrote the lives of both Durich and Pelzel, but that, though as a member of the Bohemian Society he was bound to furnish the society with some account of his own, he always deferred doing so for more than forty years, and finally the careful biographer died without leaving any particulars of his own biography. His first separate publication was in 1778, when be issued an edition of the fragment of St. Mark's Gospel preserved at Prague, and believed to he in the handwriting of the apostle, but which ho so forcibly demon strated to be spurious, that the papal nuncio of Vienna openly expressed his opinion that he had settled the question. Such an out cry however was raised against him by the inferior clergy in Bohemia, that he found it advisable to print a pamphlet which had been written against his views at his own expense, and to circulate his answer to it only in manuscript. He next commenced a periodical
review of Bohemian and Moravian literature, but this was soon stopped by the censorship for some incautious expressions in one of his prefaces complained of by some ecclesiastical authority, and which he refused to retract. It was evident to his friends that with his ardent and somewhat refractory temperament he would make no way in the church, and after the death of the emperor Joseph in 1790, he quietly withdrew into a learned retirement, subsisting on a pension which was paid him by the Austrian government as a compensation for a suppressed post he had held in the time of Joseph, and on another granted him by the Nostitz family. He made in 1792 an expedition to Denmark, Sweden, and Russia, at the expense of the Royal Bohemian Scientific Society, to inquire into the fate of the books and manuscripts, which at the time of the capture of Prague by the Swedes in the Thirty Years War, had been carried off from the Bohemiau libraries. He also made at different times excursions through every part of Bohemia and Moravia, but with this exception his life was chiefly passed in quiet at the country-seat of one of the Noetitzes. For this there was unfortunately a strong reason. In 1795 he was for some time out of his senses; in 1801 he was obliged to be confined in a lunatic asylum, and though he soon recovered from this violent attack, yet ever after, on an average twice a year, he became occasionally disordered in mind. His physicians considered that this was owing to over-study, Dobrowsky stoutly maintained that study never did harm to any man, but attributed his illness to a shot which had entered his breast in 1782 at a hunting party, and remained unextracted to his death. The longest interval of freedom from his disorder which he enjoyed was once for eighteen months, wheu he was writing the Institutiones lingure Slavicae dialecti veteria, on which his mind was fully occupied. Meanwhile his fame was constantly spreading, he was elected a member of all the distinguished academies of the east of Europe, and spoken of very highly by Clothe. For about twenty years, from 1809 to 1829, he was generally recognised as the highest authority on questions connected with the history of the Bohemian language and literature, then every year coming more and more into notice. This position was not always a pleasant one ; it led to his involvement io a controversy respecting an ancient manuscript, the diecussions on which aro said to have embittered his life fur some years. This oontroyerey Is in many points one of the most singular and interesting in the whole history of literature.