That name is not my poetic license, though it may seem to be so: we have not a poem, romance, sketch, or novel, in which the hero’s name is not “Jiří.” His deceased father,—he had a large estate, extensive fields, and a mill in the country, two leagues from Prague,—was a reader of Bohemian history, and with his whole soul loved our Poděbrad,[1]—so his son had to be called Jiří.
He was early sent to school. The kind eyes of an aunt watched over him; the old widow was childless and soon became the slave of the small despot. He passed the Gymnasium with honors, drank deeply from the ancient well of the eternally fresh classics, as we have drunk; and there were permanent traces of it in his soul: he knew that Cæsar was a great Roman with a big bald head, and that, alas! he had written dreadfully insipid memoirs; that Horace
- ↑ Jiří (George) of Poděbrad, born 1420, was the last and most famous of Bohemia’s native kings (1458–1471).
