a hill, the culminating point of the city, are the convent and gardens of the White Monks, so called from their dress of white serge. The object of peculiar interest to strangers in this establishment is the magnificence of their library and collections of MSS, maps, charts, and globes. It possesses also some very valuable paintings, the merits of which are now much defaced from being daubed over with coarse reparations. The gardens are extensive, and open to the public, and command a fine view of the city, across the river, of the Neu Stadt, and far away to the heights beyond. At the time of the troubles, in 1848, these White Monks of Strahoff were looked on suspiciously by the government from their well-known leaning to the Czeck insurrection.
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Wallenstein’s House at Prague.
On descending the hill through the principal street the attention is often painfully drawn to the clanking of chains, and we find it proceeds from miserable beings who are employed in cutting wood for firing at the different houses—wood being the sole article of fuel consumed in Bohemia, where all rooms are heated by large china or iron stoves. The parti-coloured dress of these wretched beings—one half their persons clad in black, and the other half in yellow, the imperial colours—show them instantly to be convicts, if the chains confining their legs have not before revealed their position as felons. It is the government system, instead of confining prisoners in their cells, to employ them in various useful labours, and the most usual work is cutting wood for the public, a policeman being in charge of each group while thus occupied.
Turning out of Nicholas Platz, a spot of much interest is shortly before us—the Waldstein’s Palace—once the abode of the renowned Wallenstein, and now in possession of his nearest descendants through the female line, that hero having left no son to perpetuate his glory and avenge his fate. “Put not your trust in Princes,” everyone may well exclaim with King David, on remembering what was done and sacrificed for his sovereign by that noble man, and what was the treacherous end he met with by the decree of the monarch he had served so long and faithfully. His gallant charger, which shared with him so many dangers and glories, is stuffed and stands in a hall of this princely mansion, looking really life-like, so well is the skin preserved, and so true the action. In a magnificent salle in the centre of the house are sometimes held the prettiest and most tastefully arranged flower-shows the writer has ever seen—turf and moss so artistically laid down in beds over flower-pots that they are entirely concealed from view, producing the effect of all the wonders and beauties of nature springing from and growing out of the ground itself—a deception which might advantageously be copied in our own country.
Count Irvin Nostitz’s galleries of statues and paintings are also worth a visit before the traveller leaves the Kleine Seite. And, should the weather be very oppressive, an hour’s lounge in the gardens of Prince Lobkowitz, under the chestnut groves, would agreeably complete his morning’s expedition, though we should recommend him not finally to cross the bridge without taking a peep at the church and hospital of the Knights of St.