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-these subjects are not treated with that fullness and discrimination we might have expected. The people have been in some measure overlooked by an historian devoted to the cause of the people. The archives of a court have been sedulously examined to track out the treacherous and wily course of a king or a minister; but the archives of the public, the literature of the time, or whatever remains of spoken or acted thought amongst the people, have not been ransacked with equal zeal to determine the state and condition of public opinion. A minister, or a regent, or a general, is introduced to us with all his distinctive characteristics, and we are prepared to follow and appreciate his conduct; but a great city is sometimes brought suddenly before us in its highest state of turbulent or enthusiastic action, without any preparation to warn the reader or to explain to him this particular outburst of passion or of heroism.

of the Netherlands, as related here, opens | how far it had assumed a republican cast with a patriotic movement, or an effort for independence, amongst the nobility. But these nobles were in personal character (though their political position was different) very much what our Cavaliers were in the time of Charles I. They were a high-spirited race, attached to their order, who, if they arrayed themselves on the side of the people, did so only in animosity to the Spanish court. To secure their own privileges, not to sustain any great cause of civil or religious liberty, was their real object. Of these nobles Egmont was the leader and the type. Appease them by acquiescence to their personal claims, even cajole or flatter them, and these bold, turbulent, winebibbing spirits were easily controlled. Philip II., if he had been really the skillful governor-even the mere crafty statesman -he was reputed to be, would have found no difficulty in dealing with these pleasure-loving nobles. Flattery and some personal favors, and a share of confidence and esteem, had proved sufficient to win Count Egmont, who had returned from his visit to Spain a very sufficient royalist. The execution of the Count by a monarch who up to the last had treated him as a friend, was as great a blunder as it was a crime. The King was destroying a good Catholic, and a very loyal gentleman, who, if he loved popularity too much to be a complete and faithful servant of the Spanish crown, would at all events have proved a cause of division and embarrass-tures, his stature, or any trick of gesture, ment to the patriot party. It was not till these gay nobles had in a measure left the scene, that the real strength of the resistance to Spain manifested itself. That stubborn resistance was to be found in the burgher class, in the Protestant citizen who had learnt by woeful experience that the rights of conscience, the liberty to be of that religion which had won his conviction, could be only sustained by the maintenance of his civil rights. Amongst this class, as amongst our own Puritans, religion and liberty went hand in hand. Nor is it possible to say, at every period of the struggle, whether Protestantism or patriotism was in the ascendant; they were, in fact, inseparable, or became so as the contest advanced. Now the growth of public opinion in this class; the progress that the new religion had made in the several cities, or in the country at large; the tone of political sentiment, and

But if our historian has more especially devoted himself to portray the chief actors in his great drama, it is fit that we should follow him to his chosen field; and our limited object, in these few pages, will be to draw attention to his masterly delineation of some of these personages, as of the King, the Regent, the Cardinal Granvelle, Alva, Egmont, and Orange. One pleasant peculiarity distinguishes his historical portraits; he never forgets the personal appearance of the man, his fea

but introduces these in such a manner that they accompany us throughout the history. As we have intimated already, there is nothing of the courtier in the descriptions he gives. If there is a deformity of person, a weakness or a vice, a blemish, physical or moral, it is set down with frank, unmitigated distinctness. We have a striking specimen of his graphic power near the commencement of the work, where he introduces to us the Emperor Charles V. and his court as they are seen arrayed in all their pomp and state, on that celebrated day when the Emperor retired from the cares of government, and resigned to his son Philip the largest and the most powerful of the kingdoms of Europe. From this point we may as well take up the thread of Mr. Motley's History, so far as we can follow it, as from any other.

On the twenty-fifth day of October,

1555, the city of Brussels was the scene of a grand spectacle or ceremonial, such as is rarely exhibited in the theater of the world. It was one of those occasions, indeed, when the real events of life assume a theatrical aspect, and take upon themselves the studied arrangement of the stage. They seem to mimic what is itself a mimicry of life, and to outrival the fictitious passions and the mock heroism of the theater, and whereas the stage exclaims, Behold a real court! the imperial court might say: Behold another stage. This grand ceremonial affords a very appropriate opening to Mr. Motley's

narrative:

"Such were a few only of the most prominent in that gay throng, whose fortunes, in part, it will be our duty to narrate: how many of them passing through all this glitter to a dark and scaffolds; some by midnight assassination; mysterious doom! some to perish on public others, more fortunate, to fall on the battle-field nearly all, sooner or later, to be laid in bloody graves !"*

Conspicuous above all was, of course, the aged Emperor himself. Not that he was old according to the number of his but his strenuous and active life

years,

strenuous, yet self-indulgent, and occupied to the full with war and business and pleasure-had given him the appearance of old age. He, his son, and the Queen of Hungary, stood as central figures in the scene, while the several governors of the provinces, the great councilors, and the Knights of the Golden Fleece, were artistically arranged before hm. The personal description which our author gives of the now infirm and toil-worn Emperor is by no means flattering; yet we see the wreck of what, setting aside all the prestige of rank and power, was-mind and bodyone of the most remarkable of men:

"He was about the middle hight, and had been athletic and well-proportioned. Broad in the shoulders, deep in the chest, thin in the flank, very muscular in the arms and legs, he had been able to match himself with all competitors in the tourney and the ring, and to vanquish the bull with his own hand in the favorite national amusement of Spain. He had been able in the field to do the duty of captain and soldier, to endure fatigue and exposure and every privation, except fasting. These personal advantages were now departed. Crippled in hands, knees, and legs, he supported himself with difficulty upon a crutch, with the aid of an attendant's shoulder. In face he had always

"Many individuals of existing or future historic celebrity in the Netherlands, whose names are so familiar to the student of the epoch, seemed to have been grouped, as if by premeditated design, upon this imposing platform, where the curtain was to fall forever upon the mightiest Emperor since Charlemagne, and where the opening scene of the long and tremendous tragedy of Philip's reign was to be simultaneously enacted. There was the Bishop of Arras, soon to be known throughout Christendom by the more celebrated title of Cardinal Granvelle, the serene and smiling priest whose subtle influence over the destinies of so many individuals then present, and over the fortunes of the whole land, was to be so extensive and so deadly. There was that flower of Flemish chivalry, the lineal descendant of ancient Frisian kings, already distinguished for his bravery in many fields, but not having yet won those two remarkable victories which were soon to make the name of Egmont like the sound of a trumpet throughout the whole country. Tall, magnificent in costume, with dark flowing hair, soft brown eye, smooth cheek, a slight moustache, and features of almost feminine delicacy-such was the gallant and ill-fated Lamoral Egmont. The Count Horn, too, with bold, sullen face and fan-shaped beard-a brave, honest, discontent-been ed, quarrelsome, unpopular man; the bold, debauched Brederode, with handsome, reckless face and turbulent demeanor-these, with many others whose deeds of arms were to become celebrated throughout Europe, were conspicuous in the brilliant crowd. There, too, was that learned Frisian, President Viglius crafty, plausible, adroit, eloquent-a small brisk man, with long yellow hair, glittering green eyes, round, tumid, rosy cheeks, and flowing beard. Foremost among the Spanish grandees, and close to Philip, stood the famous favorite, Ruy Gomez, or, as he was familiarly called 'Re y Gomez,' (King and Gomez,) a man of meridional aspect, with coal-black hair and beard, gleaming eyes, a face pallid with intense application, and slender but handsome figure: while in immediate attendance upon the Emperor was the immortal Prince of Orange.

extremely ugly, and time had certainly not improved his physiognomy. His hair, once of a light color, was now white with age, close-clipped and bristling; his beard was gray, coarse, and shaggy. His forehead was spacious and commanding; the eye was dark blue, with an expression both majestic and benignant. His nose was aquiline, but crooked. The lower part of his face was famous for deformity. The under-lip - a Burgundian inheritance, as faithfully transmitted as the duchy and county -was heavy and hanging, the lower jaw protruding so far beyond the upper that it was impossible for him to bring together the few fragments of teeth which still remained, or to speak a whole sentence in an intelligible voice. Eating and talking-occupations to which he was always much addicted were becoming

* Vol. i. p. 91.

He

To return to our grand ceremonial of abdication. The second person in the scene was the son, Philip, to whom he was about to resign the far greater part of his power and territory-all but the empire of Germany, which he had been unable to relinquish in his favor. Let us hear Mr. Motley's description of the gloomy monarch, so great a favorite of tragic poets:

sacrilegious hands, as Mr. Motley reminds | full vigor. Never was such dietary. "He us, on Christ's vicegerent, and kept the breakfasted at five on a fowl seethed in infallible head of the Church a prisoner to milk, and dressed with sugar and spices; serve his own political ends, was manifest- after this he went to sleep again. ly capable of being carried away by the dined at twelve, partaking always of peculiar temptations of his high imperial twenty dishes. He supped twice; at position. But in the absence of such first, soon after vespers, and the second temptations, he might very sincerely re- time at midnight, or one o'clock, which gard it as his especial duty to protect the meal was perhaps the most solid of the Catholic faith, and preserve the unity of four. After meals he ate a great quantity the Church. And why should the histo- of pastry and sweatmeats, and he irrigated rian throw any doubts or aspersions on every repast by vast draughts of beer and that personal piety of which he made prowine." fession? In Charles, as in so many others, it was a piety that had a very limited influence on moral action; it displayed itself chiefly in ritual, in prayer, in fasting, and the like; there was more of superstition in it than religion, but as a superstition it was apparently held with perfect sincerity. "No man," says Mr. Motley, "could have been more observant of religious rites. He heard mass daily; he listened to a sermon every Sunday and holiday; he confessed and received the sacrament four times a year; he was sometimes to be seen in his tent, at midnight, on his knees before a crucifix, with eyes and hands uplifted; he ate no meat in Lent, and used extraordinary diligence to discover and to punish any man, whether courtier, or plebeian, who failed to fast during the whole forty days." Why should Mr. Motley cruelly add, that "he was too good a politician not to know the value of broad phylacteries and long prayers?" Is every one who knows the value of orthodox behavior to be therefore twitted with hypocrisy? If it be really true that "he ate no meat in Lent," he gave a very notable proof of his sincerity, for the appetite of Charles V. was enormous, and he was accustomed at other times to indulge it without stint. He seems, indeed, to have had a craving, preternatural appetite, amounting to a disease, such as might well have obtained from his confessor an especial exemption in this matter of fasting.

·

"The son, Philip II., was a small, meager man, much below the middle hight, with thin legs, a narrow chest, and the shrinking, timid air of an habitual invalid. 'His body,' says his professed panegyrist, Cabrera, was but a hudwelt a soul to whose flight the immeasurable man cage, in which, however brief and narrow, expanse of heaven was too contracted.' The same wholesale admirer adds, that his aspect was so reverend, that rustics, who met him alone in a wood, without knowing him, bowed down with instinctive veneration. In face he was the living image of his father, having the same aquiline, but better proportioned, nose. same broad forehead and blue eye, with the In the lower part of the countenance the remarkable Burgudian deformity was likewise reproduced. He had the same heavy, hanging lip, with a vast mouth, and monstrously protruding lower jaw. His complexion was fair, his hair light and thin, his beard yellow, short, and pointed. He had the aspect of a Fleming, in public was still, silent-almost sepulchral. but the loftiness of a Spaniard. His demeanor He looked habitually on the ground when he conversed, was chary of speech, embarrassed, and even suffering in manner. This was ascribed partly to a natural haughtiness, which he had occasionally endeavored to overcome, and partly to habitual pains in the stomach, occasioned by his inordinate fondness for pastry."

Was there ever such an incongruous combination presented to the imagination of the reader! This downward look and

Very marvelous is the account here given us of the gastronomical exploits of the Emperor. Captain Dalgetty was a child to him. Mr. Stirling, in his Cloister Life of Charles V., had revealed to us that the monastic seclusion of the ex-Emperor did not imply a monastic regimen, or what *In pausing to gaze at the portrait of this terriis generally understood as such. Mr. Mot-curial, we felt an instinctive fear lest it, or its ble man in the Imperial Library of the Spanish Esley has given us a programme of the day's horrid ghost, should walk out of its frame. performance while his appetite was in its expression was indescribable.—ED. ELECTIC.

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