latter; but Matthias's constancy seems, in the end, to have been
overcome. The Jesuits never ceased to keep in view the ultimate
ascendancy of their own order, and they quite understood that to
accomplish this, it would be necessary to crush the spirit of
independence in Bohemia altogether. Both parties took the alarm; each
made its movement to counteract the other, and the results were such as
I have described. The Emperor Matthias, supported by the Catholic
nobility and the Jesuits of the Clementinum, insisted on nominating his
own successor, in the person of Ferdinand II.; the States, to which
adhered the Carolinum, and all that were Protestants in Bohemia,
protested against so gross a violation of their rights. Then followed
an insurrection, the expulsion of the Jesuits from the kingdom, and a
demand that neither the university nor any other seminary of education,
should again be subject to the control of that order. And finally began
that terrible struggle which crushed the liberties, as well civil as
religious, of the Bohemians. For Ferdinand, not content to scotch the
snake, never rested till it had ceased to be. The Carolinum, with all
its endowments, privileges, and libraries, was handed over to its
rival. Protestantism was declared to be extinct; and the gibbet, and
the stake, and confiscations, and banishments, rendered the decree, in
due time, more than an idle boast. There is, probably, no instance on
record of an extirpation of a religious creed more absolute than that
which the Jesuits effected of Protestantism in Bohemia. It was entirely
put out, and has never since so far revived, as to embrace
one-hundredth part of the population within the compass of its rays.

From the close of the war the University of Prague assumed the title of
the Carlo-Ferdinandian Institution. In one of its branches,
indeed,--the Carolinum,--the professors' chairs stood vacant for twelve
years, and the building itself was shut up. But at the termination of
that period it was reopened, and it has continued ever since to be the
seminary in which instruction in the faculties of law and of medicine
is communicated. For theology, and moral and abstract philosophy, on
the other hand, the student must needs repair to the Clementinum; over
which, till the suppression of the order by Joseph II., the Jesuits
presided. Nor has the downfall of that most ambitious and subtle body,
worked any important change in the constitution of the unive