culty--so despised at
first was this state, that even the rapacity of foreign monarchs
spurned her opening bloom--a stranger deigned to accept their
importunate offer of a dangerous crown. New hopes began to revive her
sinking courage; but in this new father of his country destiny gave
her a traitor, and in the critical emergency, when the implacable foe
was in full force before her very gates, Charles of Anjou invaded the
liberties which he had been called to protect. In the midst of the
tempest, too, the assassin's hand tore the steersman from the helm,
and with William of Orange the career of the infant republic was
seemingly at an end, and all her guardian angels fled. But the ship
continued to scud along before the storm, and the swelling canvas
carried her safe without the pilot's help.

Philip II missed the fruits of a deed which cost him his royal honor,
and perhaps, also, his self-respect. Liberty struggled on still with
despotism, in obstinate and dubious contest; sanguinary battles were
fought; a brilliant array of heroes succeeded each other on the field
of glory; and Flanders and Brabant were the schools which educated
generals for the coming century. A long, devastating war laid waste
the open country; victor and vanquished alike waded through blood;
while the rising republic of the waters gave a welcome to fugitive
industry, and out of the ruins of despotism erected the noble edifice
of its own greatness. For forty years lasted the war whose happy
termination was not to bless the dying eye of Philip; which destroyed
one paradise in Europe, to form a new one out of its shattered
fragments; which destroyed the choicest flower of military youth, and
while it enriched more than a quarter of the globe, impoverished the
possessor of the golden Peru. This monarch, who could expend nine
hundred tons of gold without oppressing his subjects, and by
tyrannical measure extorted far more, heaped moreover on his exhausted
people a debt of one hundred and forty millions of ducats. An
implacable hatred of liberty swallowed up all these treasures, and
consumed on the fruitless task the labor of a royal life. But the
Reformation throve amidst the devastations of the sword, and over the
blood of her citizens the banner of the new republic floated
victorious.

AUGUST WILHELM VON SCHLEGEL

Born in 1767, died in 1845; educated at Gottingen; a tutor
for three years in Amsterdam; made professor of literature