word towards the chalice above his head, of which he had been such a
valiant defender.

Then followed persecution, exile, imprisonment and corporal punishment,
in addition to the turmoil and sufferings of the Thirty Years' War.
Ferdinand's father-confessor was a Jesuit, Lamormain, and under the
latter's guidance Bohemia was being brought back to the fold, while
elsewhere in Europe men like Tilly and Waldstein, whom Schiller
preferred to call Wallenstein, were taking their part in the Catholic
Reformation, with striking results, the sack of cities and the
devastation of whole countries.

After the Catholic Reformers had seen to it that the leaders of the
movement towards religious liberty had been put away, they set about
bringing the Bohemians back to Rome in their own ingenious way. We have
seen that among other remedies against heresy they introduced, or
perhaps re-introduced, a national saint, John Nepomuk, had him canonized
and an effigy of him set up on the Charles Bridge; this effigy was
followed by many others, among them that of Loyola. Each pillar of the
bridge that Charles built is crowned by the effigy of a saint or groups
of saints, with most of whom, I regret to say, I am not acquainted.
There are, however, some old friends--Saints Ludmilla, Wenceslaus,
Cosmas and Damain, and Adalbert--who are intimately connected with the
story of Prague. There is no denying the fact that these groups of
statuary give a unique touch to the massive beauty of the Charles
Bridge, but they do not appeal to me as works of art; this is probably
due to my own shortcomings. To my thinking, the statue of St. George,
which stands close by the south entrance to the cathedral on the
Hrad[vs]any, is worth the whole collection on the Charles Bridge. This
statue, the work of the brothers George and Martin of Aussenburk, was
ordered expressly by Charles IV; it is an absolutely faithful
representation of a knight's armour as worn in the fourteenth century.
For the rest, the statuary on the bridge was not run up in the space of
a few years; the work extended over about two centuries.

The first step taken towards an outward display of regained power was
the destruction by the Jesuits of that old church which stood on the
Mala Stranske Nam[ve]sti, in which, as I told you, the martyrs of 1621
partook of the Sacraments on their road to execution. The Church of St.
Nicholas then reared its stately pile out of the medley of quaint old
roofs a