ome upon this, rising serenely in all
its ornate loveliness out of the roar and rattle of the traffic, the
sight of it catches your breath. King Vladislav II caused it to be
erected--one of the gates of the old city. An unhappy King this latter,
I should say; at least his lot was cast in unhappy times. One of the
last Slavs to occupy the throne of Bohemia--he was a Prince of
Poland--Vladislav succeeded one of the most popular of Bohemian
monarchs, George Podiebrad. The times in which Vladislav reigned were
evil; the internal religious struggles of Bohemia had reached a
desperate stage; all attempts to reunite the Utraquists with Rome had
failed, and Alexander Borgia was Pope. The reign of this King, for all
the glory of the monuments that commemorate it, seems as it were
illumined by the false light that presages disaster. His son Louis was
drowned while leaving the battlefield of Moha[vc], which reduced the
greater part of Hungary to a Turkish province, and anarchy held the
lands of the Bohemian Crown until in 1526 Ferdinand of Habsburg bribed
his way to the throne; one noble Bohemian is said to have accepted fifty
thousand gulden for his kind offices.

The "Powder Tower" looks out directly at a somewhat shabby building
opposite to it. I have mentioned it before as standing on the site of an
early monastic institution founded by those Irish monks who did so much
towards bringing Central Europe into the fold of the Church. They were,
in fact, the only missionaries, these pilgrims from the Isle of Saints,
who took up the task in the fifth and sixth centuries, wandering far
afield, through the German forests, along the great rivers Danube and
Main, to Italy and Switzerland, where St. Fridian at Lucca and St. Gall
in the hills above the Bodensee are still held in pious memory. The
Saxon monk Winfrith, better known as St. Boniface, also deserved well of
the people of Central Europe, for it was his zeal and energy which
assisted Charles the Great in his colonizing achievements. In our own
times other missionaries of Anglo-Saxon race, or at least
English-speaking, penetrated to the darkest recesses of the Continent,
even to Bohemia. They started as soon as the war was over and Europe
again a safe place to travel in. They took their toilsome way, by _train
de luxe_ and at Government expense, to such distant places as Prague and
Vienna, even Buda-Pesth. They were of those who were indispensable while
men were fighting, whose se