RAMBLES
IN
GERMANY AND ITALY.
PART III.—1842.
LETTER I.
PRAGUE.
Thursday, 1st September, 1842.
Strange and wild legends appertain to Prague, and people the heights that overhang the city. The Bohemians are of Sclavonian race; they were in early times fire-worshippers, and offered victims to their divinity on the Laurenzi Berg, which rises behind the town. On the Hradschin, an eminence that frowns above the Moldau, was built the palace of the old Bohemian kings; and the metropolitan church of Prague stands in the palace-yard, on the highest point of the imperial hill.
The most prosperous period for Prague was the reign of the Emperor Charles IV. He appears in no favourable light in the pages of Italian history; but he won immortal and deserved renown as King of Bohemia, by his acts of magnificence, and the liberality and sagacity of his government. He caused the Neustadt to be built, marking the width and termination of the streets, and leaving the spaces to be filled up by private individuals, on whom great privileges were bestowed: the size of the streets and open areas interspersed, give it a noble distinction among the ill-built towns of the middle ages. Churches and convents rose around. He built also the grand old Bridge, which spans the broad and curved stream of the Moldau, and he founded the University, which long vied with Paris and Oxford in celebrity.
The earliest Reformers sprung up in Prague. John Huss was rector of the University: his tenets were the source of that independent and Protestant spirit which then first began to undermine the Roman Catholic faith. In early times, the Church of Bohemia obtained from the Council of Basle, that the sacramental cup should be administered to the laity; and this of itself was a broad distinction between Catholic Bohemia and the rest of the Papal world.
Although John Huss died at the stake, his influence continued high in his country, where he was reverenced as a saint. The Bohemians, loving their own language and their own customs—a sagacious and intelligent race—were well pleased with any state of things that should conduce to separate them more widely from the surrounding German nations.