previous next
[510] was not curious; I mean the principal one, which I saw, for they have nine.

In the afternoon we drove out with Count Thun to see the city and a little of its environs. . . . . On our return we passed by the enormous palace where Wallenstein lived during the interval of his loss of the Emperor's favor, when—as I think Schiller relates—he pulled down the houses in the neighborhood to have free room, and stretched chains across the streets to keep quiet, affecting to be served only by nobles, and maintaining more than imperial forms and ceremonies. The estate still exists, of enormous extent, and the square before it is still called Waldstein's Square. . . . . The palace belongs to a descendant of his brother, but not the same one who lives at Dux.

June 15.—. . . . I passed a considerable part of my morning in what is called the Collegium Clementinum, or, really, the buildings of the University. It is like a city within a city, so wide do its squares and courts extend. It was originally a great establishment of the Jesuits, and is built in the fine style of architecture they adopted in all such cases. . . . .

The library contains about ninety-three thousand volumes, a beggarly matter for such an institution; and, what is worse, they looked as if they belonged to the studies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rather than to those of the nineteenth. One or two of the manuscripts interested me very much. The records of John Huss's Rectorship of the University, written in his own hand, and a copy in his own hand, also, of a work of Thomas Aquinas, were worth going far to see. I was shown, too, a curious book for the service of the Church, with the music belonging to it, splendidly illustrated, in which, on St. John's day, is a special service in honor of John Huss, as if he were one of the saints of the Church, which, in fact, he was considered here in the sixteenth century. In the margin are three very well finished miniatures,—the upper one, Wickliffe striking fire with a steel and flint, and endeavoring in vain to blow it to a flame; the middle one, Huss lighting a candle at the spark; and, below, Luther bearing a blazing torch.

The manuscript, therefore, belongs to the sixteenth century, and shows much of the confused state of religious opinion and party in Bohemia from the time of the Utraquists to the Thirty Years War. Indeed, in several parts of this manuscript Huss is called ‘Divus Johannes Huss,’ as if he were regularly canonized.

In the afternoon we drove to the Hradschin, visited anew the

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
John Huss (4)
Wickliffe (1)
Wallenstein (1)
Leo Thun (1)
Schiller (1)
Johannes Huss (1)
Thomas Aquinas (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
June 15th (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: