e with. There must be in
the quaint little backwaters of Mala Strana a certain indigenous type
which considers it bold and venturesome to cross the Charles Bridge, a
proceeding smacking of foreign travel.

The block of buildings including the tall Church of St. Nicholas, which
fills up the middle of that irregular place, the Mala Stranske
Nam[ve]sti, or Place of the Small Side, would be new to Vladislav were
he to repeat his progress to-day. There was a church--a very old one--on
this spot, dating back to the thirteenth century; it is said that the
martyrs of 1621 communicated here _in utraque_ on the morning of their
execution. The tall, imposing Church of St. Nicholas replaced the older
edifice--a typical monument this of Jesuit pride of conquest over the
fallen National Church of Bohemia. Seen from my terrace, the copper dome
of St. Nicholas, its tall and slender campanile, stand up dominant over
sleepy red-tiled roofs where linger memories of much earlier days. It is
indeed a splendid building, this master-work of Ignatius and Kilian
Dienzenhoffer. I must admit this, little as I admire _baroque_ and for
all my loathing of the spirit of triumphant intolerance and bigotry
which informed the builders of this great monument to the enslavement of
a nation's soul.

In former years, before the war, there stood here in the narrowest part
of this place, a monument to another triumph over Bohemia's freedom, a
monument to Field-Marshal Radecky, whose figure was supported by types
of Austrian soldiery of his time. This monument has been
removed--destroyed, I believe, by the Pragers when they regained their
freedom in October 1918. The removal of this monument leaves a blank,
not a sentimental one, merely an artistic one, and has led to an
unexpected and probably undesired effect. It has given undue prominence
to a little building that stands some way up the place, a building of
strict utility with no pretensions to architectural consideration, a
building which now stands out exposed as it were, trying to hide its
confusion under a mask of gaudy advertisement posters.

The singularly characteristic houses on the north side of this square,
with their deep arcades, were probably rebuilt or renovated in the
seventeenth century; they must be of considerable antiquity, for one of
them, a corner house called "Montagu," has its place in history. The
name, by the way, is not derived from the Italian, but from the simple
German _Monta