in the middle, on which you ride at plea- | ed at 60,000 cwt. The Prussian Commersure, sideways or a stride. The dress of cial League has now put so heavy a duty the Bohemian women, then going to mass, upon fruit that it can no longer find purwas exceedingly picturesque. They wore chasers beyond the frontier; and the unshawls of the most brilliant colours on their fortunate growers are obliged to see their heads: these shawls are crossed under wealth rot about them. It is curious that, the chin, and tied on the top of the head, notwithstanding the multitude of orchards, so as to conceal the face about as much cider is unknown; and it is said, that the as a helmet with the beaver raised. Some peasants could not be pursuaded to drink of the peasants' wives wore skull-caps, it, beer being the ordinary beverage of the with two starched appendages behind, the people. The wines of Leitmeritz, and shaped like a butterfly's wings. particularly the Melniker and Czernoseker, are the best in Bohemia, but they are only to be tolerated in a country where little wine is to be had except the execrable produce of the Austrian grape. Foreign wines are subject to an enormous duty, and even the wines of Hungary, which are the cheapest in the world on the spot where they are made, pay a heavy impost, on entering the other provinces of the empire.

We changed horses at Arbesau, and posted over the field of battle of Culm. The Austrians and Prussians have raised monuments in honour of their victory: the Austrian obelisk is inscribed to Gene. ral Colloredo, the Prussian one is dedicated with better feeling to the remembrance of the immortal struggle sustained alike by king and country. We had now entered the estate of Prince Clary Aldringer, and the eye ranged southwards over the valley in which Teplitz lies, broken here and their by some towering eminence crowned by a ruined fortalice, and shut in by the sugar-loaf peaks of the Milleschau mountains.

Who has not heard of the hundred and fifty mineral waters of Bohemia, of the hot torrent of Carlsbad, and the warm springs of Teplitz? Alas! that I must hurry on from the baths, and the gay company, and the pleasant walks about Prince Clary's palace; and from the congress of 1835, where the affairs of Europe were not decided. But I must leave the history of that singular summer untold; and if I do not get away from the mountains, and across the plains near Theresein-stadt, we shall not reach Prague to-night.

As we arrived upon the last ridge of the vast and varied range of the Erzgebirge, the view was exceedingly striking: the whole surface of the country appeared like one immense corn field, now bare of its harvest, but varied by gentle sweeps and hillocks, abundantly planted with fruit-trees, fringed with hop-walks and vineyards, and dotted with the spires and habitations of the Bohemian villages. At Weldruss, in the domain of Jewiowes, we visited the park of Count Chotek, abounding in Italian poplars and fine oaks, through which we wandered along paths of shrubs, by the side of pleasant brooks. In the grounds of the Bohemian nobles there is a total want of evergreens, which are said not to bear the rigour of the climate. The same reason is assigned for the absence of green crops in their husbandry; and I was informed that the cattle are mainly fed in winter upon hay, which is grown on the lower lands. The price of hay- being then somewhat above the average-was about 21. 15s. a ton.

We drove along this rich arable country till, as we approachek the brow of the hills, the clouds of dust and the more frequent traffic apprized us of the neighbourhood of a great city. There passed a Bohemian wagoner, with his train of light and spirited horses, unblinkered and almost urharnessed, struggling along with the ardour of their wild race: there a peasant, diving his heavy equipage drawn by grey Polish oxen slowly up the hill. Suddenly one of those views burst upon us, which, like the prospect from the Jura, or the first sight of Venice, can only be seen once in the startling grandeur ofits novelty. Upon the shores of the broad Moldau lay the city of Prague at our feet, crowned with countless towers, some tapering with the graceful spires and lanthorn turrets of the earlier periods of architecture, others adorned with the massive cupolas of a later age; and the whole picture was backed by the enormous mass of the Hradschin, with its Gothic cathedral and the immense façade of the palace, glittering on the ridge of the splendid amphitheatre of hills. As we descended from the eminence, what recollections crowded upon the mind!-how many alliances, here contracted and here dissolved-how many armies, here united and here dispersedhow many great historic shadows chasing each other from the scene! Prague is essentially a metropolitan city; there is no other town in Bohemia with a population of more than 8,000 inhabitants. Its circumference is four leagues, its area is 2,115,611 square toises, and its population (with a garrison of 12,000 men) is estimated at 118,000.

Like those Italian cities which it rivals in beauty and surpasses in harmonious grandeur, Prague recals none of the associations of ordinary life or common The quantity of fruit grown in the circle transactions; its history forms a part of of Leitmeritz is so great that the annual the greatest struggles of principles and exportation to the whole of Germany, and powers which the christian world ever even to St. Petersburg, has been comput-witnessed; and it stands preserved, like

some great Temple of the Past, in which | the city which does not bear some trace the memory of the old time, and the monu- of the taste, piety, and liberality, of Charles ments of great deeds, fill and fire the IV. The world contains few examples of mind. Such too is the external character a man who did so much and so well, not of the city; as you drive along its streets only for himself and his people, but for every building has some romantic feature us, who are his remote posterity." of its own; here an armorial device, there a saint with his golden circlet or burning lamps,or a half-obliteraed fresco, an arched balcony, a fortified gateway, or an ornamented shrine. Nor is this old and enduring character of the city without its importance; at a period when every political means are employed to efface and subdue the national character-when every act of social life must be Austrian to be innocent-there is a power and a spirit in these unshaken walls and these perennial customs, which must needs keep the memory of their great origin and their former energy fresh in the hearts of the Bohemian people.

II. THE CITY OF PRAGUE.

But the seeds of civilization, thus prodigally sown, bore a speedy harvest and a bitter fruit. In the beginning of the following century, Huss and Jerome taught and perished: the wars of the Hussites, which then broke out, put an end to the blessings of peace and the refinements of prosperity in Prague. Bohemia, which had stepped beyond the rest of Europe in the defence of her civil and religious liberties, maintained the premature conflict for two entire ages. She finally lost those liberties when they were extending most widely in other countries: and the monuments of Prague, which attest her former prosperity and her pride, also recal her long conflict, her heroic leaders, her dreadful persecutions, and her final subjugation to that House of Austria, which has been, early and late, the perpetual enemy of all that was great and free in the provinces of its empire.

Lì si vedrà tra l'opere d'Alberto

Quella che tosto moverà la penna,
Perchè 'l regno di Praga fia deserto.

PARAD. xix. 115.

Of all the great men of the fourteenth century, whose energy and wisdom prepared the way for future generations, by strengthening and improving their own, none have been more unjustly treated by history than the Emperor Charles IV. He did not indeed revive the fallen party of the Ghibellines, or give an emperor to Italy; but he conferred the Golden Bull upon the German princes; he made With these reminiscences of the past, Prague, his city of residence, the rival of let us wander awhile through this city, the brilliant court of Robert of Naples, by still splendid with antiquity-fallen indeed collecting there the choicest artists and from its former estate, but neither ruined most accomplished scholars of Europe; nor decayed. Of the three distinct parts he cherished the language, the manners, into which Prague is divided (and which and the liberties of his Bohemian sub- had each a separate municipal constitujects; he made their nation the flower of tion in the middle ages,) the Klein-Seite, eastern and of western Europe, the centre on the left bank of the Moldau, has ever of knowledge and of power; and, al- been the seat of the nobility and of the though he incurred the rebuke of Petrarch, monarch; its streets and squares, rich his memory is still cherished by the Bo- with churches and palaces, slope up the hemian people as the greatest of their bene- steep ascent of the Hradschin, whence factors and the wisest of their kings. the royal residence, and the magnificent Nearly five centuries have passed since piles surrounding it, command the whole he reigned, and Prague is still adorned city. The Alt Stadt, on the opposite shore, with the solid magnificence of the monu- is still the seat of trade, and its buildings ments he raised, which have for the most are for the most part connected with the part outlived the institutions he granted history of that great Hussite party, which to their schools, to their municipalities, was defeated by the burghers of Prague and to the ecclesiastical bodies. The against the world, whose worship was splendid bridge which still unites the celebrated in the Teyn Church, and whose banks of the Moldau, extending to a length rights were long asserted and finally deof 1,780 feet, and terminated by strong tur- stroyed in the venerable chambers of the reted gateways, was built by the archi-Town Hall. The Neustadt, or new town, tects of Charles. The battlements of the city wall, which still defend the green sides of the St. Lawrence mountain, were raised by him to give employment, as it is said, to the working population of the city -for of invasion there was, in his time, no fear. The cathedral of St. Vitus, on the summit of the imperial Hradschin, is still in the unfinished state in which it was left by Matthew of Arras and Peter Arlieri, in the year 1380; and there is not a street in

was projected and begun by Charles IV.: it covers an immense space of ground, less peopled than the other parts of Prague, and it contains the vast convents, hospitals, and public buildings, which owed their magnificence to the Jesuits, who interspersed the older monuments of the city with the rich but meretricious Italian architecture of their Order.

It is related by the chroniclers, that Charles IV., (whose ordinary residence

was at the old palace of Könighof in the | Bohemia was surrendered to that soveAltstadt,) was wont to take the princes of reign who had rewarded the genius of her the empire with him up to the windows of Wallenstein with assassination and athis castle on the hill, and, pointing with tainder-who answered her call for freedelight to the broad site of the Neustadt, dom and toleration with a lasting edict of to exclaim, "See, this is my work." The blood and chains. place of the Hradschin was built at much later periods, and the Hall of Ladislas, with a few of the old towers above the postern, are all that remain of the old castle or burg. But the view from the apartments is still the same-a noble prospect for a monarch's eye. Immediately beneath lies the whole of Prague; the Klein Seite, with the great cupola of St Nicholas, a church of the Jesuits, in the foreground; the long palace of Wallenstein, coiled, as it were, round the foot of the imperia! rock; the Lobkowicz palace on the right hand, with its beautiful gardens rising up the side of the adjacent hill, which is crowned by the stately Premonstratensian Convent of Strahow; the centre of the panorama is divided by the Moldau, whose broad and curved stream is broken by green islands and crossed by the long array of statues on the bridge; beyond it rise the cupola of the Church of the Red Cross Knights, the lanthorn-towers of the Town Hall and the Teyn Church, and the peaked roofs of the Altstadt, which is surrounded by the immense white bulildings of the suburbs spreading out to the foot of the hills.

The metropolitan church of Prague stands in the palace yard, on the highest point of the Hradschin. The outer walls are imperfect, and the choir alone was finished-being a very small portion of the original plan. This church, emblazoned with the shields of the house of Hapsburg-with the proud bearings of Bohemia, Hungary, Styria, Moravia, Carinthia, Burgundy, Spain, and Brabantthe rich ornaments of the Golden Fleece and the imperial cipher-is more like the chapel of a sovereign than the cathedral of a nation. The side-chapels, however retain the memory of the earlier worthies of Bohemian history. That of St. Adalbert, who was the second Bishop of Prague, and was murdered by the Prussians, a heathen horde, whom he went to convert in 997, is still frequented by the people. The song of St. Adalbert has also survived the lapse of years, and its austere but affecting melody is still sung in the churches of his country. The chapel of St. Wenceslas, the fourth Christian Duke of Bohemia, who perished by the hand of his brother in 936, is larger and more splendid. Its walls are inlaid with Bohemian jasper, agates, and chrysophras, and they are adorned with some of the finest frescopaintings of the fourteenth century now in existence. The lower row of paintings is attributed partly to Nicholas Wurmser of Strasburgh, and partly to the excellent Bohemian artists,* Dietrich of Prague and others, who were encouraged by Charles IV., the builder of the chapel. The outer wall of the building, on the side next the palace, is covered with mosaics. The group in the centre represents_the Slavonian saints, St. Sigismund, St. Pro

On a narrow terrace, immediately below the palace, two obelisks mark the spot where Martinitz and Slawata were thrown out of the windows of theGreen Chiber, at the beginning of the Thirty years' war. The windows, which opened their casements to so treasonable an act on the persons of the Imperial Commissioners, have been punished by being half walled up with coarse brick. The proceedings, which the emperor said, with some truth, to be alike contrary to reason and nature, was sanctioned by the immemorial custom of Bohemia. Throughout the wars of the Hussites, we read of whole corporations thrown from the upper stories of the * Dietrich of Prague and the school of Slatown hall, generally with more unpleasant vonian artists to which he belonged deserve more consequences than befell Martinitz and notice than they have hitherto obtained in the hisSlawata, who were picked up, after a fall tory of painting. They emanated directly from of thirty feet, and put to bed by a lady of the school of Byzantine artists which had sprung quality, the Princess Penelope Lobko- up in Kiew, whose works abound in the Russian wicz. An attempt was made to justify the churches. The paintings of Dietrich of Pragne are quite equal to the finest productions of the art, measure by an appeal to the fate of Jeze- either in Italy or on the Rhine, in the fourteenth bel and to the Tarpeian rock. But this fool- century. Amongst the best of his pictures may ish exploit of the rash patriots of Bohemia be mentioned a St. Thomas, remarkable for its was rapidly followed by events which give expression and correct drawing; a Madonna and it an abiding place in history. It was the Child, which is kept in an abbey on the confines of first act of violence in the great struggle of Bohemia, near Linz; and a group, containing Thirty Years, in which the North and the portraits of Charles IV. and his son Wenceslas, South, the Protestant and the Catholic, the then a boy, supported by St. Sigismond and St. Austrian and the Swede, contended for Wenceslas, kneeling before the Virgin. The Bohemian artists were remarkable for the perfecsupremacy; and the war, which ended in tion of their portraits. In the last-mentioned pic1648 with the unsuccessful siege of Prague, ture the age of the young Prince Wenceslas was begun in 1618 on the spots of ground (afterwards Wenceslas IV.,) determines the date still marked out by these obelisks. The of the picture, which must have been painted peace of Westphalia was signed; and about 1370.

copius, St. Vitus, St. Wenceslas, St. Lud- | IV., and the then Archbishop of Prague,* milla (his mother,) and St. Adalbert, interceding with the Virgin; above this mosaic is a St. Veronica head of Christ of the finest character. These works may sustain a comparison with the best mosaics of that age in St. Mark's at Venice.

grace the splendour of the imperial court. edifice was erected by German merchants It still belongs to his collateral descend-in 1407. Shortly afterwards the Germans ants, though they do not bear the name of Wallenstein (in three syllables) by which he is more commonly designated.

were driven out of Prague by the patriotic exertions of Huss, and when the Hussites had become the national party in Bohemia, But our present path, across the bridge the Teyn was, in fact, the metropolitan and down the narrow streets of the old church of the bulk of the people. It was city, leads to the irregular area which is the seat of the eloquent prelate, John of formed by the Town-Hall on one side, Rokyzan, who extorted religious toleraand the Teyn Church on the other. On ration from the Council of Basle, and who this spot the tournaments were held, for raised his friend, the virtuous George of which the chivalry of Bohemia was so cele- Podiebrad, to the throne, by an election brated, and the knight-errant King John, which took place within its walls. Of the who, blind as he was, perished in the thick greatness of those men, who preceded the of the fight at Crecy. It was in this place more successful reformers of Germany by that the Utraquist Bishop Augustin com- half a century, and far surpassed them in municated the eucharist to the whole tolerance and enlightened policy, history people, under both elements, in 1484. It has not yet taken a sufficient account. was this same Ring which witnessed the The building in which so many of their great festivities to welcome the house of Haps- acts were proclaimed to the people, has long burg to Bohemia's throne; and which after-since been restoredto the pure Latin rite; wards drank the blood of her religionist, but the rude antiquity of its ornaments, the and her patriots shed upon the scaffolds of simplicity ofits architecture, and the class of the Ferdinands.

The time is long past since the inscription, still to be seen over the Town-Hall, told the truth :

:

"Hæc domus odit, amat, punit, conservat, honorat,

Nequitiem, pacem, crimina, jura, probos.”

people by whom it is frequented, show that it is still the church ofthe Bohemian populace. The service is almost entirely performed in the vernacular language; and the whole congregation joins with the fervour and musical taste of the Slavonians in the hymns and responses, which are peculiar to their country.

But in the middle ages the municipality brad to the throne in 1458, which insured After the accession of George of Podieof Prague was one of the most powerful the supremacy of the Hussite or Calixtine in Europe; it was the focus of the liberties party, a huge statue of that prince was put of the country. The Rathsherrn, or senators of the city, governed the country in up over the Teyn church, with a sword in case of an interregnum, and presided at ken the cause he had supported. Now one hand and a cup in the other, to betothe election of the king. They gave ad- one Peter Eschenloer, who was no great vice to the sovereign as the most power- friend of the party which gloried thus in ful, and supplies as the most wealthy, of having obtained the sacramental cup for his subjects. These great privileges are the laity, says "In the year after this now reduced to very narrow limits by the statue was erected, the storks came and jealousy of the imperial administration; built their nests in this cup, which was so and the senators, who were elected by the big that it might well have held a quarter burgesses till the reign of the late emper- of a cask of beer. And so unnaturally did or, are now solely appointed by the the storks fill up this cup with adders, crown. The building still remains entire; snakes, toads, and all manner of poisonbut the rich oaken ceiling of the senateous worms, that the cup could not contain hall is already condemned as insecure. The small chapel occupies an oriel win-them, and they fell alive into the streets, dow which projects whence they were so numerous, that great over the square alarm came upon the Bohemians in below; but the only memorial it contains Prague. Gladly would they have taken of the ancient powers and martial prow- down that cup, but they durst not. Whereess of the burghers of Prague, is one of those heavy-spiked flails which were used upon Rokyzan sent a man up to cover the to such deadly purpose by the peasant its nest there any more. cup, so that no stork should sit and make Truly this was army of Zizka—the Puritans of the fifteeth a plague of God: and the Bohemians The church of the Teyn stands imme-ought, in all reason, to have acknowledged diately opposite the great front of the Town-Hall. From every part of the city, and from the neighbouring hills, you discern the two light towers of the old church, delicately tapered, aud flanked each by a double circlet of four turrets of the most simple and tasteful architecture. A church was dedicated to the Virgin on that spot by Boriwoi, the first Christian Duke of Bohemia, as early as 868: but the present

century.

that their cup was poison, and straighttians." Since that time a statue of the way made themselves like other ChrisVirgin has been put up in the place where King George of Podiebrad once stood.

Charles IV. laid the first stone of the NeuOn the 25th of March, 1348, the Emperor stadt, or new town of Prague, outside the