THE
HE sixteenth century is, to the na-

tions of the modern world, all, and more than all, that the age of Cæsar was to the Roman Empire.

The visible development of modern society dates from that epoch; modern politics, modern literature, modern philosophy, modern industry, all shot up in the sixteenth century to the light. The century was born to greatness; it inherited from its immediate predecessor such a legacy in the invention of printing and the discovery of the New World, as had been the portion of no previous era since the advent of Christianity.

Thus magnificently endowed, it enriched history with wonders and with heroes, with triumphs of character and with miracles of genius, which tinge all the annals of the time with hues of romance. The whole aspect of Europe, in that century, is incomparably picturesque. The grand masses and heavy shadows of feudalism are everywhere touched and kindled by flashing lights of individual power, and endeavor, and achievement.

Everywhere, the crystallization of nationalities was going on-the concentration of authority, the expansion of enterprise.

Life in the middle ages had been comparatively simple; its lines strongly marked; the wants of men few; their passions exclusive and intense. In the sixteenth century, life became suddenly richer, more varied: a thousand new desires, curiosities, aspirations, awoke in the hearts of men. The limits of the physical world opened and receded before the followers of a Columbus and a Vasco de Gama: the horizon of the moral and the intellectual world widened on the daring eyes of a Luther, an Erasmus, and a Bruno. All that makes our modern life peculiar, first begins to appear distinctly, on the face of Europe, in the sixteenth century.

Of things both great and small, this is wonderfully true. In the sixteenth century, Europe began to colonize the East and the West; commerce and civilization followed the flags of Portugal, and Spain, and France, and England into the farthest Indies, as of old it had sailed with the galleys of Greece around the coasts of the Mediterranean.

Luxuries, now become the necessaries

of modern life, then first lent a new grace and a new comfort to existence. All the arts, from agriculture to engraving, flourished with the vigor of spring.

In the sixteenth century, an English statesman first shook his wise head over the columns of a morning paper; in the sixteenth century, an English yeoman brewed the first mug of English beer from English hops; in the sixteenth century, the Anglican Church listened to its first sermons, and the English dining-table saw its first salads; then, the first coach-wheels rumbled through London streets, and the first spinningwheel sang by the peasant's door. Protestantism and philology, potatoes and tobacco, turnips and race-horses, Lyons silks and English stockings, dictionaries and tax-bills, street-lamps and telescopes, Genevan theology and the Italian opera--all these indispensable elements of modern civilization we owe to the sixteenth century. We might run on in our list till the brain of the reader should turn, but we will forbear.

In that busy, passionate, ambitious age, every year "shone in the sudden making of splendid names." And what names! In the plastic arts, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Titian, Tintoret, Da Vinci, Correggio, Albert Durer, Holbein; Brunelleschi, Bramante, Palladio, in architecture; Palestrina, Carissimi, Allegri, in music; in the sciences, Bacon, Galileo, Copernicus,_Kepler, Tycho Brahe; in learning, Erasmus, Reuchlin, Thomas More, Scaliger, the Stephens; in philosophy, Bruno, Campanella, Peter Ramus, Patrizzi; in theology, Luther, Calvin, Melancthon, Zuingle, Knox, Loyola; in adventure such a multitude, Ojeda, Cortez, Pizarro, the Cabots, Drake, Frobisher, Hawkins, the magnificent Raleigh; in poetry and letters, the sunset of Italy, the sunrise of England, Tasso, Ariosto, Guarini, Sidney, Spenser, Marlow, Beaumont, the Fletchers, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare; the flower, too, of the Gallic genius, Montaigne, Rabelais, Charron, Marot; splendid and mighty sovereigns, Charles V., Francis the First, Maximilian, the Popes Leo and Julius, Philip of Spain, Henry of England, the heroic Elizabeth, the bad beautiful Mary of Scotland; in war, the great generals of Italy and Spain, Trivulzio,

Gonsalvo, Pescara, Spinola, Parma, Egmont, Prince Maurice, the valiant English admirals, the Lion of Sweden, the Austrians Wallenstein and Tilly, the Ottoman lords of the Levant!

But amid the bewildering and fascinating splendors of this marvelous century we are able to discern one vast interest predominant over all the others, and the student of history sees the "very pulse of the machine" in the passion of free thought which then agitated mankind.

The battle of inquiry with authority is the great battle of the sixteenth century; and the great champion of authority in that fearful conflict was the dark, saturnine, mysterious sovereign of Spain and the Indies-the heir of Charles V.

Just three hundred years ago, on the 25th of October, 1555, in the great hall of the royal palace at Brussels, Charles the Fifth, Emperor of Germany, having resolved to surrender all earthly pomps and dignities, and to seek, in the quiet of the cloister, the salvation of his soul, abdicated the sovereignty of Flanders and Burgundy in favor of his son and heir, Philip, Prince of the Asturias. On the 16th of January, 1556, the crowns of Castile and Aragon, with their dependencies, passed in like manner from the father to the son.

Already wedded to the Queen Mary of England, Philip then found himself, in the flower of his years, master of the most powerful monarchy upon earth. To set forth the manner in which he wielded the tremendous power lodged in his hands, to paint his character and his career, is a task worthy the best powers of the greatest of historians. A work which should completely describe the reign of Philip the Second, in all its great relations to the political, social, and spiritual history of mankind, would be itself the monument of an age. Such a work the historian of Ferdinand and Isabella has not attempted to construct. Master of an easy and flowing style, and enabled, by fortunate leisure, and careful cultivation, to collect his materials in abundance, and to weigh them with discretion, Mr. Prescott aims rather at pictorial than at philosophical eminence. He excels especially in the narration of stirring events, and he has the eye of a chronicler for those striking and brilliant features which individualize a scene or a personage.

Within a few years, the secret archives to which Philip had committed his most private correspondence with his ministers and his satellites (it is the best indication, perhaps, of the sincerity of this champion of bigotry, that he does not seem to have destroyed the records even of his most atrocious transactions) have been made accessible to the scholar. Of these, Mr. Prescott has availed himself, and of other resources so numerous and so new as to justify his belief, that his new work will "present the reader with such authentic statements of facts as may afford him a better point of view than he has hitherto possessed, for surveying the history of Philip the Second."

Two volumes of Mr. Prescott's book are now before us.

The historian commences his task with a sketch, lightly but firmly drawn, of the condition of the empire which owned the sway of Charles the Fifth, and of the influences which moved that monarch to exchange the crowns of such a dominion as Europe had not seen since the days of Charlemagne, for the simple cowl of a monk and the solitudes of Yuste. Mr. Prescott does more than justice, we think, to the character of Charles, at the expense of a much greater man, the Emperor Dioclesian; and we must confess our surprise at finding no reference, in this part of the sketch, to the careful and thorough researches of Mr. Stirling-an omission which is the more remarkable, that Mr. Prescott is by no means sparing in his use of complimentary notes.

The scene of Charles's abdication at Brussels is vividly and effectively painted, and awakens the reader's interest. in the fortunes of the young Philip, so strangely and singularly invested with the grandeurs of royalty.

This interest is sustained by a brief account of Philip's earlier years, in which we catch indications of his coming character. The Prince of the Asturias was slight and small in figure, but well built and symmetrical. His yellowish hair, his keen blue eyes, cencentrating their glances beneath brows so closely knit as to be remarkable, his heavy, haughty Austrian under lip, and large protruding under jaw, bore witness to his descent from the wily princes of Burgundy and the despotic house of Hapsburg. In manners and demeanor he was, how.ever, a complete Castilian-reserved,

thoughtful, even saturnine, somewhat given to gallantry, but more to seclusion and reflection; careful in his attention to appearances, always rich and elegant, but never gaudy or affected in costume. Left early an orphan, by his mother's death, and deprived, by his father's frequent and prolonged absences from Spain, of any really parental watchfulness, Philip was, nevertheless, carefully trained by preceptors whom Charles selected with discrimination, and whose efforts he seconded, himself, by letters, in which he sought to form his son to kingcraft.

The occasion of Philip's first marriage with the Infanta of Portugal furnishes Mr. Prescott with an opportunity for describing the splendors and singularities of the Spanish costume and manners in the sixteenth century.

The birth of his first son, the toofamous Don Carlos, soon deprived Philip of his young bride, and left him a widower at the age of eighteen.

All

In 1548, he was summoned by his father to the government of Flanders; and, making an almost royal progress through Aragon, embarked at Barcelona, under the convoy of a Genoese fleet, commanded by that hero of a hundred battles, Andrew Doria. the magnificence of magnificent Italy was lavished upon the reception of the heir of Charles. Mr. Prescott paints, with glowing colors, the journey of the Prince, pursued by embassies and deputations, past the field of Pavia-so glorious to the Spanish arms-on to Milan- the proudest jewel in the Italian crown of the emperor. Thence, by the Tyrol, through Munich, we follow the grand parade to Flanders. We have graceful jousts in Lombardy and.splendid tournaments in the Netherlands, and we meet, for the first time, among the roses and diamonds of these festivities, with the personages who are to play the greatest and most tragic parts in the sombre drama, yet to come, of Philip's reign, Egmont, Van Hoorne, Savoy, Alva. Through all this pageant of violet-colored velvet and cloth of gold, and crimson canopies fluttering above tiers of lovely ladies, the small, silent, austere Philip moves like the shape of fate, presaging the scaffold, the rack, the black draperies of the Inquisition.

Philip, as Mr. Prescott observes, discovered, in this visit to Flanders and Germany, how truly he was a.

Spaniard, and how little sympathy he had or could have with his northern subjects. They, themselves, made the same discovery; and, though Philip drank more than was good for him, and put himself to the pains of touching his hat, in order to acquire a Flemish popularity, he left a very disagreeable reputation behind him, when he went back to Spain; and Charles found it impossible to persuade the imperial electors that Philip ought to be king of the Romans.

The years which immediately followed Philip's visit to Flanders, were years of humiliation for Charles, who was foiled by the French, and beaten by the German Protestants; but these misfortunes did not much affect Spain. The intense Spanish nationality was too much delighted with the possession of a true Spanish heir-apparent, to be disturbed by the reverses of the empire.

Charles, losing all hope of perpetuating his own imperial dignity in the person of his son, was anxious to achieve for that son some extraordinary accession of power, which might compensate for the loss of the holy Roman crown. He accordingly planned, and, with great tact and ability, carried through the project of a marriage between Philip and his cousin Mary, now sovereign of England. The son of Henry II. of France had just won the queen of Scotland, and Charles could not allow such a move on the political chess-board to pass unnoticed."

The first year of his new wedlock had not expired, when Philip was summoned, by his father, from the arms of a bride whose lavish tenderness he had begun to find somewhat embarrassing, to receive the sceptre of his hereditary dominions.

The abdication of Charles made Philip the foremost figure in the political world. Master of Spain and the Indies, of Naples, Milan, Franche Comté, and the Low Countries, at the head of the most powerful army and the most formidable navy of the world, he ruled his vast dominions with an authority more absolute than had been possessed by any European prince since the days of the Cæsars."

Thoroughly convinced that Providence had devolved upon him the task of maintaining the endangered unity of the church, Philip entered upon a course

of policy which was a perpetual menace to the liberties of every state in Europe. Arrested for a moment, at the outset of his career, by an unwelcome conflict with the Holy See, which was forced upon him by the Italian patriotism and the personal pride of Pope Paul IV., Philip availed himself of the easy triumph won by the veterans of his Neapolitan army, to manifest in the clearest way the settled purposes of his heart.

It was a portentous sight for Protestant Europe, that spectacle of the victorious Alva humiliating himself before the pontiff whom he had vanquished!

The meaning of the portent soon became dismally plain.

Victorious in France as in Italy, Philip made no apologies to Henry II. for beating his chivalry at St. Quentin and Gravelines. At the peace of Chateau Cambresis, Spain received a province in exchange for every town which she surrendered. When the death of Mary deprived him of the titular crown of England, Philip sued for the hand of Elizabeth, in terms which made it clear that he must be received as a master, if at all, and that wherever he was master, the church of Rome must be supreme. Rejected by Elizabeth, who, in this first step of her royal career, committed herself to the cause of Protestantism and national independence, Philip lost no time in allying himself with a daughter of Catholic France. As soon as he had concluded the preliminaries of his third nuptials, he departed to put his house in order. He traveled through the Netherlands, confirming every where the bad impression which he had formerly made, and satisfying himself most thoroughly that his Flemish provinces were infected with the disorders of freedom, and needed his healing hand.

Philip's theory of spiritual medicine was the same with that of Loyola; he thought it best to extenuate the body, in order to save the soul, and he signalized his return to Spain by such an application of this system as astounded Europe, and revolted even his own son, Don Carlos. "Better not reign at all, than reign over heretics,” he had said to one of his councillors, in Flanders; and his first appearance at Valladolid was celebrated by a grand Auto da Fé, in which those heroic martyrs of Spanish Protestantism, De Seso and De Roxas,

expiated their sincerity at the stake. The pages which Mr. Prescott consecrates to the account of the Spanish persecution, are most moving and manly. He has written nothing more worthy of his fame. So stealthy had the Grand Inquisitor been in his preparations, and so inexorable was Philip in his bigotry, that Protestantism in Spain was stifled suddenly and at once.

The next step of the sovereign who had thus deliberately constituted himself the crowned personification of the Council of Trent, was to subject Flanders to the same course of purification which had delivered Spain from the demon of progress.

The Netherlandish states of Philip were, at this time, the glory of his dominions. The golden Indies did not yield to the treasury of Spain so large a revenue as was collected from the intelligent industry of Flanders. "Antwerp was the banking-house of Europe," and its merchants "rivaled the nobles • of other lands in the splendor of their dress and domestic establishments." It was rare to find one of the humbler classes " unacquainted with the rudiments of grammar, and there was scarcely a peasant who could not read and write." In fact, the germs of that school system which is now the pride of New England, had already been planted by the burghers of the Flemish cities.

"It was not possible," as Mr. Prescott observes, "that such a people should long remain insensible to the great religious reform which, having risen on their borders, was now spreading over Christendom."

Charles the Fifth had perceived the growth of heresy in Flanders, and had fulminated against it the most dreadful edicts. But these edicts had been imperfectly executed, and the Regent Margaret of Parma, though instructed by Philip to use greater severity, had preferred the prosperity of Flanders to the preservation of the Catholic faith. Philip resolved that the work should be done. His resolution, and the means he used to execute it, gave rise to the world-famous Revolt of the Netherlands -a revolt which occupied the greater part of his reign, and which ended in the humiliation of Spain and the rise of the great Protestant republic of Holland. The earlier stages of this tremendous conflict, down to the execution

of Egmont and Van Hoorne-those Netherlandish heroes, whose story belongs as much to the realm of poetry as to that of history-are described by Mr. Prescott in the volumes of his work now before us. Of no passage in history is the interest more profound and dramatic. The intense will of Philip, opposed by the will, fully as intense and more nobly directed, of William the Taciturn; the pitiless soldier Alva matched against indomitable preachers like Marnix; the insanities of the Iconoclasts replying to the atrocities of the Inquisition; Spain standing, between death and famine, to offer the crucifix of Rome; Flanders answering with Leyden, "better be Turks than Papists!"-with such materials, it would hardly be possible for the most ordinary writer to construct a history which should be wholly unattractive to American readers. How much Mr. Prescott has made of the episode, may be easily . guessed. His sketch, not yet completed, will be the best introduction to the specific history of those troubles; and we are glad to have his testimony to the value of that work upon the Netherlands, which we are shortly to receive from Mr. Lathrop Motley.

Two other episodes in the life of Philip have been treated by Mr. Prescott in his second volume, and conclude this portion of his work-the siege of Malta and the story of Don Carlos. To the first of these, the historian, tempted by the subject, has given, we must think, too great a prominence; but readers in general, perhaps, will not quarrel with the number of the brilliant pages thus added to the book. Mr. Prescott has a gentleman's sympathy with chivalric warriors, and writes of their deeds with a kind of gentlemanly enthusiasm. Upon the tragedy of Carlos little light can be thrown, till a certain "green box," not yet produced, shall see the day. But Mr. Prescott has made it plain enough, we think, that Philip acted a cruel and unnatural part by his son, from his childhood, and that the Prince, towards the end of his life, was not a responsible agent. confess that we cannot escape from a conviction, that the death of the prince, who was convicted of insubordination

We

and suspected of heresy, must be charged directly upon his dark, unscrupulous, and bigoted father.

From this hasty sketch of the subjects which engage Mr. Prescott's attention, in the first volumes of his history, our readers will see how interesting they must be. They will see, too, how improper it would be for us to enter now upon any extended critical notice of the work-so much of Philip's history yet remains to be treated, and so many of its most important relations.

We have yet to witness, in the tremendous collision between England and Spain, the first of those gigantic European conflicts, of which our own times, let us hope, are beholding the last the final emancipation of the Northern Netherlands; the final subjugation of the Southern Provinces; the triumph of commerce over military blindness; and the triumph of brute force over unenlightened industry. The interference of Spain in the great French struggles of the League, and in the thirty years' war of Germany; the conquest of Portugal; the seeming culmination, and the true decay, of the Spanish might-these are yet to be dealt with.

The volumes already published will not merely sustain, they will enhance, Mr. Prescott's reputation. His style, though still deficient in finish, has visibly gained in elegance and in force. His narrative is as masterly as ever; his generalizations are more full, broad, and

luminous.

We have already stated our impres sion, that the episode of the siege of Malta is described at too great length; and we should make the same objection, in a more decided manner, to the account of the cloister life of Charles V., which adds nothing to the narratives of Stirling and Mignet, and is handled in such a way as to throw it quite out of any vital connection with the history of Philip.

Yet we are sure that few readers will lay these volumes down without echoing our hope, that we may soon possess the sequel of a work which reflects such honor, alike upon its author and upon his country.