The Story of Prague
following day a great battle took place between the Prussians and Austrians between the village of Sterbohol, four and a half miles from Prague, and the city itself. Carlyle has given us a very spirited, though somewhat inaccurate, description of this great battle, which he calls ‘the famed Battle of Prag; which sounded through all the world—and used to deafen us in drawing-rooms within man’s memory.’ The battle ended with a complete defeat of the Imperialists, and the Austrian army had—as Carlyle words it—‘to roll pell-mell into Prague and hastily close the door behind it.’ The town was again so fiercely bombarded that whole streets were in ruins, and St. Vitus’s Cathedral and other historical buildings greatly suffered. The Austrian victory at Kolin obliged the Prussians to raise the siege of Prague.
The battle of 1757 is the last warlike event with which Prague is connected, if we except the civil tumult in 1848. The town played no part in the later events of the Seven Years’ War, nor in the long struggle between Austria and France that, with short intervals, lasted from 1792 to 1815.
In the peaceful years that followed the Congress of Vienna (1815) the Bohemian nation strove—as far as the jealousy of a strictly absolutist Government permitted—to recover some of its ancient rights and privileges, and particularly to revive the national language. Prague was the centre of this movement, particularly after the foundation of the Bohemian Museum.
A visitor to Prague who enters at all into communications with the inhabitants will hear so much of this movement that I do not think I should here pass it over altogether in silence. The Bohemian language that, during the period of independence, had gradually
