The consequences of the barbarous measures of the Council of Constance became immediately visible. Even the common people began to show an intense interest in the numberless theological pamphlets, which were published in Bohemia and Moravia for or against Huss. Among the former, one written by a female deserves to be distinguished. The copies of the Bohemian Bible became greatly multiplied; many of them were made by females: and Æneas Sylvius takes occasion to praise the biblical erudition of the women of the Taborites, whilst the abbot Stephen of Dolan in Moravia complains of their meddling in ecclesiastical affairs. In the revision of the text of the Bohemian Scriptures, the clergy were indefatigable. From 1410 to 1488, when the Bible was first printed, at least four recensions of the whole Bible can be distinguished, and several more of the New Testament. The different parties of the Hussites were united in a warm partiality for their own language; the Taborites began as early as 1423 to hold their service in Bohemian. After the compact of 1434, the Calixtins also attempted to introduce the mass in their own language, an innovation which caused new disturbances and contests. Meanwhile the language of the country assumed gradually even among the Romanists its natural rights; the privileges of the city of Prague, the laws of the painters' guild, the statutes of the miners, were translated into Bohemian. At the session of the Estates in Moravia in 1480, the Latin was exchanged for the Bohemian; in Bohemia itself not before 1495. The knowledge of the Bohemian language, which Albert duke of Bavaria had acquired at the court of king Wenceslaus, where he was educated, had a decided influence on the Bohemian Estates, when in 1441 they offered him their crown. Under George Podiebrad, diebrad, a Bohemian by birth, this language even became that of the court. After the death of George, one of the reasons which led to the election of Vladislaus, king of Poland, was, that the Bohemians "could hope to see elevated through him the glory of the Bohemian nation and of the Slavic language." [21] Under this king all ordinances and decrees were issued in the Bohemian language, which gained prodigiously in pliancy and extent by the application of it to different uses. The most favourable influence on its formation, however, was effected towards the close of the fifteenth century, by the custom which began to prevail of studying the classics, and of translating them with all the fidelity of which the idiom was capable. Thus fostered by judicious application and patriotic feeling, the Bohemian language approached, with rapid steps, the period of its _golden age_,--a time, indeed, in a political respect, of oppression, war, and devastation; but affording a gratifying proof, how powerfully moral means may counteract physical causes.