I paid for my journey from Vienna to Prague thirty-five florins Wiener Währung, and we made the journey in five days. Our first day's journey brought us to Höllabrunn, having stoppd to dinner at Stockeran. The road is excellent and the several towns and villages we past thro' clean and well built. The landscape was either a plain, or gently undulating and extremely well cultivated.
Bohemia resembles Moravia, being an exceedingly rich corn country, generally open; not many trees about the country near the road side, except at the Chateau and farm houses. The language is a dialect of the Sclavonic, mixed with some German; but at the inns there is always one or two servants who speak German. In Bohemia a traveller not speaking German, and who has no interpreter with him, would find himself greatly embarrassed. The Bohemians call themselves in their own language Cherschky, and the Hungarians call themselves Magyar.
[117] Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, canto XV, ottave 31, 32:
Un uom della Liguria avrà ardimento
All' incognito corao esporsi in prima…
Tu spiegherai, Colombo, a un nuovo polo
Lontane si le fortunate antenne…—ED.
[118] Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, XL, 31, 1.—ED.
[119] See reference to Eustace p. 131.
[120] Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, XXVIII, 38, 7.—ED.
[121] Boileau, Satires, XI, v. 117.
[122] The drama, Der Wold bei Hermannstadt, is the work of Johanna Fraenul von Weissenthurn (1773-1847), a celebrated Viennese actress and authoress. An opera was written on the same text by W. Westmeyer, —ED.
[123] Because I am an Englishman—You are an Englishman? you are certainly a North-German; you speak very correct German.—Gentlemen, I tell you I am an Englishman; many English study and speak the German language and if you had held a long conversation with me, you would soon have perceived from my faults in speaking, that I am not a German.—But you have answered our questions so correctly.—Why not, the same questions have been put to me so often that I have all the necessary answers by heart like a catechism.