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lowing terrific, but not exaggerated passage:

"As an administrator of the civil and judicial affairs of the country, Alva at once reduced its institutions to a frightful simplicity. In the place of the ancient laws of which the Netherlands were so proud, he substituted the BloodCouncil. This tribunal was even more arbitrary than the Inquisition. Never was a simpler apparatus for tyranny devised than this great labor-saving machine. Never was so great a quantity of murder and robbery achieved with such dispatch and regularity. Sentences, executions and confiscations, to an incredible extent, were turned out daily with appalling precision. For this invention, Alva alone is responsible. The tribunal and its counselors were the work and the creatures of his hand, and faithfully did they accomplish the dark purpose of their existence. Nor can it be urged, in extenuation of the Governor's crimes, that he was but the blind and fanatically loyal slave of his sovereign. A noble nature could not have contaminated itself with such slaughter-house work, but might have sought to mitigate the royal policy without forswearing allegiance. A nature less rigid than iron would at least have manifested compunction, as it found itself converted into a fleshless instrument of massacre. More decided than his master, however, he seemed, by his promptness, to rebuke the dilatory genius of Philip. The king seemed, at times, to loiter over his work, teasing and tantalizing his appetite for vengeance, before it should be gratified. Alva, rapid and brutal, scorned such epicureauism. He strode with gigantic steps over haughty statutes and popufar constitutions; crushing alike the magnates who claimed a bench of monarchs for the rjury, and the ignoble artisans who could appeal only to the laws of their land. From the pompous and theatrical scaffolds of Egmont and Horn, to the nineteen halters prepared by Master Karl, to hang up the chief bakers and brewers of Brussels on their own thresholds-from the beheading of the twenty nobles on the Horsemarket, in the opening of the Governor's career, to the roasting alive of Uitenhoove at its close from the block on which fell the honored head of Anthony Straalen, to the obscure chair in which the ancient gentlewoman of Amsterdam suffered death for an act of vicarious mercy -from one year's end to another's-from the most signal to the most squalid scenes of sacrifice, the eye and hand of the great master directed, without weariness, the task imposed by the sovereign.

"No doubt the work of almost indiscriminate massacre had been duly mapped out. Not often in history has a governor arrived to administer the affairs of a province where the whole population, three millions strong, had been formally sentenced to death. As time wore on, however, he even surpassed the bloody instructions which he had received. He waived aside the recommendations of the Blood-Council to mercy; he dissuaded the monarch from attempting the path of clemency, which, for secret reasons, Philip was inclined at one period to attempt. The Governor had, as he assured the King, been using gentleness in vain, and he was now determined to try what a little wholesome severity could effect. These words were written immediately after the massacre at Harlem.

"With all the bloodshed at Mons, and Naarden, and Mechlin, and by the Council of Tu

mults, daily, for six years long, still crying from the ground, he taxed himself with a misplaced and foolish tenderness to the people. He assured the King that when Alkmaar should be taken, he would not spare a 'living soul among its whole population; and, as his parting advice, he recommended that every city in the Netherlands should be burned to the ground, except a few which could be occupied permanently by the royal troops. On the whole. so finished a picture of a perfect and absolute tyranny has rarely been presented to mankind by history, as in Alva's administration of the Netherlands.

"The tens of thousands in those miserable

provinces who fell victims to the gallows, the sword, the stake, the living grave, or to living banishment, have never been counted; for those statistics of barbarity are often effaced from human record. Enough, however, is known, and enough has been recited in the preceding pages. No mode in which human beings have ever caused their fellow-creatures to suffer, was omitted from daily practice. Men, women, and children, old and young, nobles and paupers, opulent burghers, hospital patients, lunatics, dead bodies, all were indiscriminately made to furnish food for the scaffold and the stake. Men were tortured, beheaded, hanged by the neck and by the legs, burned before slow fires, pinched to death with red hot tongs, broken upon the wheel, starved, and flayed alive. Their skins stripped from the living body, were stretched upon drums, to be beaten in the march of their brethren to the gallows. The bodies of many who had died a natural death were exhumed, and their festering remains hanged upon the gibbet, on pretext that they had died without receiving the sacra ment, but in reality that their property might become the legitimate prey of the treasury. Marriages of long standing were dissolved by order of government, that rich heiresses might be married against their will to foreigners whom they abhorred. Women and children were executed for the crime of assisting their fugitive husbands and parents with a penny in their utmost need, and even for consoling them with a letter in their exile. Such was the regular course of affairs as administered by the BloodCouncil. The additional barbarities committed amid the sack and ruin of those blazing and starving cities are almost beyond belief; unborn infants were torn from the living bodies of their mothers; women and children were violated by thousands; and whole populations burned and hacked to pieces by soldiers in every mode which cruelty, in its wanton inge. nuity, could devise."

While we shudder at the contemplation of such a character, and are oppressed with fears lest his ruthless persecution should extinguish the innocent people of the Netherlands, we are relieved by the appearance of another personage, of William Prince of Orange, who, emerging brightly from the earlier scenes of these gloomy troubles, grows more luminous and beautiful, as the darkness thickens, and disasters accumulate. The heir of a noble house, opulent and sumptuous, but refined and accomplished in all the humanities of

the time, he comes before us, first as the favorite of the Emperor Charles, whose hands rested upon his shoulder in that imperial display at Brussels, when, like Diocletian, he relinquished the glories of the crown. We find him next among the band of stately nobles encompassing the throne of Margaret, who sought to mollify the harsher edicts of the King, and to guide her government aright. A calm, observant, indomitable spiritplastic enough to assume the impressions of the moment, but never so weak as to sink under them-friendly, social, ambitious, but self-centred and equal to any destiny, "no o'ergrowths of complexion breaking down the pales and forts of reason," William was finally recogcognized by all parties, as the master of the epoch-by his friends, who put unlimited trust in him, and by his enemies, who felt towards him a no less unlimited fear. "He was born," as Schiller says, "to command the respect and to win the hearts of men." Less enthusiastic and wiser than either Egmont or Horn, he avoided the complicities into which they fell, while his self-respect restrained him from the orgies of Brederode, and his early religious indifference from the fanaticism of the sectaries. But though he did not mingle in the turbulent assemblages of the preachers, nor echo the wild warcries of the Gueux, he did not less keenly feel the sufferings of his country, nor less energetically resist the wrongs of her oppressors. By singular reticence of temper, which, in the wisdom of Polonius's advice, allowed “his thought no tongue, nor any unproportioned thought his act," he kept aloof from the popular ferments, and yet was of too impressible and generous a nature to feel aloof from the popular afflictions. With the unerring instinct of the heart, the people everywhere felt him to be their friend. They saw how his interest and earnestness rose with the occasion, and how his piety awoke and grew as the woes endured before him began to deepen and to touch his profounder sensibilities. Thus, his moderation at the outset had the double consequence of gaining him a universal confidence, and of preparing him, while others retired from the combat exhausted and broken, to enter it as if afresh. He protested and appealed, so long as protests and apeals appeared to be available; but when it was seen that the hour for these was past, he drew the sword and threw

away the scabbard. His rank, his fortune, his eloquence, his industry, his genius, his religion, all that he had, and all that he was, were then given to the cause with a cheerful and unflagging alacrity. The man to whom Philip, had he been a wise and good king, as he was a bad and foolish one, would have committed the government of his provinces, was now become his open enemy. The man, whom he could not bribe, nor entrap, nor quell, was now, by the simple force of principles, the most formidable foe which his monarchy had yet encountered.

It was, however, a long and weary way that Orange had to tread before the world was destined to reap the fruits of his patriotism and virtue-a way all saturated in blood, encompassed with difficulties, broken by vicissitudes, and ending at last in his own death. The imagination looks almost in vain through history for a sadder yet nobler figure than that which William presented during the forlorner periods of his undertaking, when this mate of emperors, this splendid and wealthy noble, accustomed to the shows of rank and the solaces of friendship, having sacrificed his fortune, and abandoned his home, was stripped of his dignities, and wandered alone, almost penniless, an outcast among foreign nations, eagerly soliciting aid for his country, and, by superhuman efforts, striving to organize an army. As we follow his painful career at that crisis, we think involuntarily of that noble exile of our day, who now weeps, deserted in the streets of London, the fallen fortunes of his own dear Hungary, and the pitiless revulsions of time. But the peculiarity of William's position, unlike that of Kossuth, was, that he stood almost entirely alone. Arrayed against the mightiest monarchy of the earth, there were few who dared to sympathize openly in his struggles, and none to comprehend his designs. The reluctant allies, whom he gained by his persuasions, fled like sheep on the first reverses. The soldiers, whom he raised by promises, were mercenaries, and when the time came, he possessed no money to meet their demands. The patriots, who acted with him, were headstrong, violent, and impatient of control; and, animated often by the spirit of the freebooter, rather than by his own wise and disinterested love of justice, imitated the

excesses which had made the Spaniard hideous. His most efficient helpers, the adherents of the new religion, were the bitter partisans of sect, and not, like him, the champions of universal toler

ance.

Time and time again was he betrayed by the dissensions of Calvinist and Lutheran; and, time and time again, when his prospects were at the highest, when fortune seemed to be about to float him, on the waves of success, to the fullest fruition of his hopes, some rashness of a leader, or some instability of the rabble, who were his troops, would plunge him into the abysses of helplessness and despair.

It is remarkable, however, all through these most desperate miscarriages and defeats-even after that most gigantic treachery which history records, when the king of France, having lured him on by promises of assistance against the Catholics, consummated his plan on the night of St. Bartholomew, in the blood of thirty thousand of his Huguenot subjects-how much his soul retained its elasticity, its courage, and its confidence. In his hours of deepest distress, he did not wholly despond; looking calmly to the issue of things, he estimated their transient changes rightly; and while the vast fabric of his enterprises was tumbling in ruins around him, and carrying with it, to the eyes of others, the fortunes of his country, he discerned the end, trusted in the vitality of his cause, and clung to his faith in God. In this far-seeing firmness, this immovable constancy of purpose, this invincible superiority to the smaller as well as larger persecutions of fate, he stood a type of our own Washington, who was never so great and triumphant as in those dark hours when others would have been baffled and overcast. Joined to this equanimity in adverse circumstances was a rare and fertile power of combination, by which he extracted success out of failure. It is remarkable, among the many skirmishes, battles, and sieges, between the Spaniards and the Netherlanders, how invariably the former, owing to their superiority in every point of discipline and effectiveness, were the victors, and yet how little they gained by it. Scarcely had their echoes of triumph died away, before they were called upon to meet some new conjuncture, which the Prince had arrayed, seemingly more formidable than that which they had just

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dispersed. In political intrigue as in military movements, he evinced this same marvelous command of untoward events. When the romantic Don John, the brilliant hero of Lepanto, was sent to the Low Countries, to recover by smiles what Alva had lost by the ax and the sword, nothing could have been more promising than the prospects opened to him, by his gay feastings of the men and his gallant flatteries of the women. He had only to win the sombre William, to render the nation all his own. He made the attempt; he cajoled, he coaxed, he wheedled, he presented the most gorgeous pictures to the ambition and selfishness of the Prince, and in a little while found himself hemmed in on every side, deprived of his armies, abhorred by the nation, and as heartily sick of the Netherlands and William as ever a man was of a bad bargain. Again, when the Catholic nobles, jealous of the power of the Prince, invited the Archduke Matthias of Austria to come over and help them, the silent William consented: Matthias was made the Governor General, and William his Lieutenant; but it was soon remarked by everybody, that William was the real ruler, and Matthias only his secretary. In order to retrieve this false move, the nobles then invited over the French Duke of Alençon, to which William also consented, and when he came, he was glad to accept the barren honors by which Orange neutralized his powers of mischief, without turning him into an enemy. In fact, as a politician, William had no equal in that day, and had he possessed but half the force of his enemies, or had the people for whose weal he labored been united, he might have easily attained a complete and final success. But the materials with which he wrought were of the most perverse and refractory kind, and the good which might have been achieved in five years, was spread over a lifetime.

We share with Mr. Motley his admiration of the character of William; we regard him as both a good and great man; in liberality and justice of sentiment he was far in advance of his age; his ability in the management of affairs was amazing; and he was rightly called the Father of the People: but we think that he sometimes carried his policy of reserve to the point of dissimulation. He clung to the illusion of royalty long after an abandonment of it would have

1856.]

The Rise of the been justified. He deliberated when he ought to have struck, and he finessed when he should have taken the trick. We are aware of the sinister and tortuous policy with which he had to contend, and how difficult it is at this day to estimate justly the complex and counteracting influences of such remote events; but we do feel, while reading the history of his life, under all the prepossessions excited by Mr. Motley's highly-colored narrative, that a more impulsive quality of mind would have assisted his efforts, and raised him to a loftier niche of greatness. It would be unfair, however, on this account, to deny his exalted merits as a statesman. Through prodigious difficulties, and by unexampled sacrifices, he accomplished the emancipation of the United Provinces, and laid the foundation of a At a time glorious national structure.

46

when the provinces of North America were yet unknown, a half century before the Puritans had landed at Plymouth, while Frobisher was making his second voyage, and Gilbert and Raleigh were only beginning to colonize the new world, the Dutch Republic, in anticipation of our own, had bequeathed to the world of thought the great idea of the toleration of all opinions, and, to the world of action, the prolific principle of federal union." It is the eternal honor of Holland, and of those by whom her redemption was procured, that she was the first among the modern nations to exemplify in practice a Christian state.

The story of the battles and sufferings, by which these events were brought about, is told by Mr. Motley with remarkable animation and skill. Availing himself of all the original authorities to be found in the various archives of Belgium and Holland, he has constructed a narrative full of interest and instruction. He paints the confused scenes of the period he has chosen to describeits great and little passions, its wonderful adventures, its atrocious and its noble men, its terrible sieges and picturesque festivals, bridals in the midst of massacres, its fights upon the sea and under the sea, its torture-fires and bloodbaths-in vivid colors, with a bold, free hand, and yet with a masterly knowledge of effect. Whatever was dramatic in those fierce conflicts of a whole social life, he has seized; whatever is peculiar or striking in character, he has penetrated; whatever is significant of time

Dutch Republic.

or place, he appropriates: while he has
never forgotten the great purpose of
history, which is, the illustration of moral
power. It is impossible to read a page
of his book, without feeling that his
mind is one of unusual vigor, and that
his heart is in the right place.
gratefully welcome him, therefore, to
the number of our successful histori-

ans.

We

Let us add, at the same time, that his work is disfigured by certain defects, which it would be well to correct in subsequent editions. The style is ambitiously rhetorical, in many places, and throughout needs simplicity. The headings of the chapters are often offensively undignified and colloquial. His irony, too, sometimes degenerates into mere sneering, and his attempts at humor are now and then out of place. As a whole, A great the narrative is too diffuse. many needless episodes are introduced, and details are given of unimportant incidents; nor does Mr. Motley always preserve the impartiality of the historian. He pleads the cause of the Netherlands, in certain cases, in which ho should have delivered their sentence. There were occasions, in the course of their struggle, when they conducted themselves with extreme meanness, as well as atrocity, and which sadly mar the effect of the heroic picture which Mr. Motley seems anxious to present. These he passes over rather hurriedly, although he omits no opportunity which is furnished him for censuring the Spaniards.

In a few historical allusions, also, not falling directly within his course, we notice that he is inaccurate. He speaks, for instance, of Thomas Muncer, as a leader of the anabaptists, and denounces by implication his personal character. Now Munzer (which is the real name) was a leader of the peasants, during the peasants' war in, Germany; was in no wise connected with the anabaptists-who came on the scene ten years later than he—and was a man of lofty religious character. The least agreeable part of these volumes is the historic introduction, which smacks somewhat of the stilted style of Mr. Carlyle, the worst model, perhaps, both grammatically and rhetorically, could adopt. that a young writer Yet these are trivial blemishes in a work of indisputable merit, which, in spite of them, absorbs the reader's attention from the preface to the close.

WE

SCAMPAVIAS.

PART IV.-THE PINNACLE OF PENTELICUS.

E were a long while at the Piræus, where I passed the life of a parched chestnut, during the parching; for such a boiling pool of water, held in a basin of sun-roasted marble, does not exist anywhere.

One salamanderish, red-hot morning, while turning our parched eye-balls towards the high mountains around, we resolved to shake off our lassitude and seek a mouthful of fresh air on the cool, tall peak of Pentelicus.

We left the seething, smoking frigate, her black wales throwing off an atmosphere of lambent heat, and landed at the port. There we hallooed our obliging friend Black to his balcony, fresh from his mid-day siesta, and succeeded in dragooning him into a spare seat in a carriage which we had chartered for the

occasion.

Now our friend Black is not only the husband of the original maid of Athens, bless her good amiable soul, but an accomplished linguist and a highly intelligent and entertaining gentleman. He came to Greece with that gallant old buccaneer, Lord Cochrane, at the breaking out of the revolution, and has not only seen service, but is as conversant with the affairs of the country, and the rascalities of the rulers, as the prime minister himself; perhaps more Withal, our friend Black has an appreciative relish for rollicking about the world, and can tell a pure Havana, or a good glass of sherry, wherever he finds them. For my part, I almost adored Black.

So.

Our coach was an old rattle-trap of a superannuated traveling chaise, evidently sold off the grande route, and furbished up for Greece. I had the front seat; but as the cushion was as hard as lignum vitæ, and a mere ledge of about four inches wide, I kept slipping off, while my feet and legs became numb in striving to maintain an equilibrium of bottom, so that I was fain to take a place outside with the driver.

Leaving the broken streets of the port, we struck into the main road, and then jolted on as uncomfortably as could be expected. There was a breeze blowing up the gulf, which sent the dust flying in choking clouds around us. The

horses were not to our taste, not being excitable creatures, though their jehu was, and he continually made a noise to urge them on, very like to a person trying to light a hard-rolled cigar. Like all Greek drivers, he was attired in the red fez, tight jacket, and a lot of nasty petticoats.

The plain between the Piræus and Athens was once, perhaps, very beautiful. Of late years, however, owing to the sloth and indifference of the government and people, the ravages of war and the Turks, when the Moslems were good enough to cut down the famous olive groves that had withstood the brunt of centuries, so that their cavalry could prance about to advantage-what with all these causes, there is little left in the landscape pleasant for the eye to dwell upon. There is nothing green to be seen, except at intervals clusters of pale, sickly olives, a mournful fig-tree, or a few patches of corn. All else, from the shores of the blue gulf to the dried, baked hills in the interior, presents the same desolate, arid aspect. We passed a small herd of camels, browsing along the plain, and even they would at times raise their sharp snouts to heaven, as if beseeching the gods to send them something green and grassy to feed upon.

About mid-way to the city is a cluster of sheds and wells, where snarling curs are trained to bark horses to a halt; where vile fiddles are scraping incessantly for the enjoyment of travelers; and where nauseous resin wine and strong liquids for bipeds, besides water for horses, are to be had. The proprietor of the principal shop looked a retired pirate, as indeed he was, living in easy circumstances after his perils by sea. He was a sociably disposed rascal, and fond of slapping respectable individuals on the legs, designating them familiarly, in imperfect Saxon, as his "chummies," not forgetful, at the same time, to extend the hospitality of his bottles. On one occasion, however, he tried this innocent little game with our admiral, who, in return, gave him such a double jointed twist in the arm as to incapacitate the pirate for his favorite amusement for some time to come.

In an hour from the Piræus we left

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