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ublic schools for three years, at the least. He must bring with him also a slender stock of German, arithmetic, mathematics, Greek, and Latin; which for six years more he labours only to increase. Then comes a fresh distribution of the students, who, throughout these protracted periods, have gone on together; but, who now pass off into the schools of law, and medicine, and divinity, according to the nature of the professions for which they are respectively intended. The candidates for the cope and the judge's chair complete the course in four years more. From the incipient Esculapius six years professional study is demanded. It is worthy of remark, that not a single lecture is delivered in the vernacular language of the country. German is, indeed, employed, where Latin may have grown into disrepute; but the Bohemian is a dialect of which the use seems restricted to the very lowest and most despised of the peasantry. It would be idle to conceal that the extreme vigilance of the government in these respects, and, still more, its bigoted hostility to everything which might recall the recollection of Bohemian independence, has given great umbrage to the thinking portion of the people. I have conversed with persons in every rank, and I found none who spoke of it except in bitterness. But it is not by these means alone that the house of Austria endeavours to shield its Bohemian subjects from the infection of liberalized opinions. I had intrusted to me, before leaving London, an English book, which I was to forward or deliver to a gentleman of rank in the country. He would not send for it by the hands of a common messenger. He came in person many miles to receive it, "Because," said he, "one does not know what may happen, and it is best to avoid collision with the police." The book was a very harmless one,--it was only the first volume of Lockhart's _Life of Sir Walter Scott_; but my friend did not consider that it would be prudent to make a parade of its reception. Again, I visited a gentleman in Prague, and found upon his table a number of the _Foreign Quarterly Review_. There was an article in it which bore upon the existing condition of Bohemia,--an able paper, on the whole, though here and there inaccurate. I conversed with him about it; and, having an hour to spare, I accepted his offer to carry it to my hotel, and there read it. "When you send it back," said he, "be so good as wrap it carefully up in paper. We don't kn
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