vated to the minutest corner, round which, like
sentinels on duty, were gathered a succession of mountains, covered to
their peaks with foliage. The dark hue of the fir was here beautifully
intermixed with the fresher green of the birch and hazel; while
occasionally, an enormous rock raised his bald front over all, more
after the fashion of a huge ruin, the monument of man's vanity, than of
a fabric of nature's creation. But the circumstance which more than all
others surprised us, was the density of the population. Of large towns
there seem to be, in Bohemia, very few; but every vale and strath is
crowded with human dwellings, village succeeding village, and hamlet
treading on hamlet, with the most remarkable fecundity. On the other
hand, you may strain your eyes in vain in search of those species of
habitations which give to our English landscapes their peculiar charm.
There is no such thing in all Bohemia,--I question whether there be in
all Germany,--as a park; and as to detached farm-houses, they are
totally unknown. The nobility inhabit what they term schlosses, that is
to say, castles or palaces, which are invariably planted down, either
in the very heart of a town or large village, or at most, a gunshot
removed from it. No sweeping meadows surround them with their tasteful
swells, their umbrageous covers and lordly avenues; no deer troop from
glade to glade, or cluster in groups round the stem of some giant oak,
their favourite haunt for ages. But up to the very hall-door, or at
least to the foundations of the wall, which girdles in the court-yard,
perhaps twelve or twenty feet wide, the plough regularly passes. A
garden, the graff generally possesses, and his taste in flowers is
good; but it almost always happens that his very garden affords no
privacy, and that his flowers are huddled together within some narrow
space, perhaps in the very court-yard of which I have already spoken as
alone dividing his mansion from the open and cultivated fields.

With respect, again, to the condition of the cultivators, that is, in
all respects, so different from the state of our agricultural gentlemen
at home, that, even at the hazard of saying over again what has been
stated a thousand times already, I must describe it at length. In the
first place, then, there is no class of persons in Bohemia corresponding
to our English farmer. Nobody hires land in order to make a profit out
of it; at least nobody for such a purpose hires