In Bohemia, as in Hungary, the spirit of national independence had now embodied itself in the desire to preserve and revive the national language; and in 1809 a new impulse was given to this desire by the discovery of a parchment which had been wrapped round the pillars of a hall, and which was found to contain some old Bohemian poems. These poems were believed to belong to the thirteenth or fourteenth century; and the Bohemians held them to be superior to anything which had been produced by the Germans at that period. As a matter of course, German scholars at once came forward to try to disprove the authenticity of these poems; and the fight raged hotly. The expulsion of the Bohemian language from its literary position seemed to many to have deprived this struggle of any living interest. But writers were arising who were determined to show that that language could still be made a vehicle of literary expression; and they even hoped to make it the centre of a Slavonic movement. For the Bohemian language had a kind of offshoot in the North of Hungary among the race of the Slovaks; and the interest which the poet Kollar and the philologer Szaffarik were stirring up in the Slovak dialect was adding new force to the Bohemian movement. The historian Palacky increased the effect which was produced by these writers; and, what is more remarkable, men whose names showed an evidently German origin became fascinated by this new movement. Count Leo Thun entered into a controversy with Pulszky about the worth of the Slavonic languages; and one may still see in Prague the statue of Joseph Jungmann, who was one of the first founders of unions for reviving the national language. A struggle of the Bohemian Estates in 1837 to maintain their control over taxation was sufficient, though unsuccessful, to increase considerably the interest felt by their nation in their political life. And thus it came to pass that, when, in March, 1848, the news of the French Revolution came to Prague, it found the Bohemians ready for the emergency.