Really there is something about this city which is smile-producing. It is difficult to analyse, and may be attributed to the sheer beauty of the place. And your smile may well go with a catch in your throat, for there is always pathos in great beauty, and nowhere more so than here in Prague. There is the delicate beauty of the Town Hall Chapel, and facing it the tall steeples of the Tyn Church, with clusters of quaint little pointed turrets, overtop a row of houses that seem to have set themselves down with the deliberate intention of blocking the west entrance. Now these houses are arcaded, and so are those on the south side of the square. You puzzle for a while and then recall Padua, Verona and other towns of Northern Italy; so now you know whence came the inspiration that set up arcades in a northern capital. You ask how and when this influence came to Prague, so I remind you of the relations that existed between Bohemia and Italy, and of which I have told you when discussing King John and his great son Charles. Under the guidance of the latter, the Renaissance was not long in making its influence felt in Prague--in fact, in all Bohemia--and Italian architects who introduced the arcaded house added fresh beauties to the city. To the earlier period of Italian influence must be attributed a quaint arched house, the one at the corner of the Tynska Ulice. It seems to block the west entrance to the Church of Our Lady of Tyn. The old house dates back to the early days of the fourteenth century, at which period the Tyn Church, though founded in the eleventh century, was still a-building. I cannot blame the old houses for having squatted down in front of this church; they were probably under the impression that it would never be finished. They have at least left a vaulted alley-way leading to the somewhat insignificant west entrance. The Tyn Church, though not completed till fairly recently, has actually served as the principal church of the Old Town since 1310. Here the reformers, preachers that I have already mentioned, Conrad Waldhauser and Milič of Kroměřiže, drew large congregations by their fiery denunciations and their call to repentance. Our Lady of Tyn is to Prague what St. Paul's is to London in a certain degree; many celebrities are buried here, among them that strange character Tycho de Brahe, astronomer, logician, drunkard and duellist, the friend of Keppler and his own worst enemy. The show-entrance to the Tyn Church is a Gothic porch of rarest beauty; it is tucked away in the little alley on the north side, and generally closed. You are expected to enter by the south door.