noble
arches; it is protected at either extremity by embattled towers,--in
their day, without doubt, very efficient _tetes du pont_, and to
adorn its parapets on either hand, it has the statues of many saints,
with more than one crucifix and two chapels. Among these watchers over
the temporal and spiritual prosperity of Bohemia, St. John of Nepomuc
holds a conspicuous place. Being now in an especial manner the guardian
of bridges, his position here is more honoured than that even of the
Virgin herself: he occupies the very centre of the pile, and may be
distinguished from the rest by the five stars which glitter in their
gilding round him; yet is his canonization an event of little more than
a century's growth. He was set up by the Jesuits in 1729, in opposition
to St. John Huss, to whom the Bohemians, for many years after the
suppression of the Protestant worship among them, continued to pay
saintly honours; and he continues to this day, in the reverence with
which he is everywhere greeted,--a sort of galling and vexatious,
because constantly-recurring memorial, of the system of mental
thraldom, under which Bohemia has long groaned.

From the bridge, you pass by a noble street, where churches and stately
mansions woo you on either hand, up the steep ascent of the Hradschin;
the summit of which will be most speedily, and therefore comfortably,
attained, if you mount a flight of stone steps that faces you after you
have made a slight turn to the right. They conduct at once to the sort
of platform on which stand the old and new palaces, the cathedral, the
lodgings of the canons, and the residences of some of the official
personages to whose charge these buildings are committed. Of the
cathedral, I have already said, that it never was completed. According
to the traditions of the place, this is, indeed, the third pile which,
consecrated to the worship of the true God, has graced the brow of the
Hradschin; but the two first were entirely destroyed by fire, and this,
begun by Charles IV., remains exactly as, in 1380, his architects,
Matthew of Arras, and Peter Arlieri, left it. It is an extremely
beautiful specimen of the sort of Gothic which preceded that of the
date of our own Henry VII., and is surmounted by a lantern-crown,
similar in its character, and not very different in its dimensions,
from that which is to be seen on the tower of St. Giles's in Edinburgh.
Yet is the pile, when spoken of as a cathedral, a very sorr