ad not the faintest
conception--while the utter want of adaptation of his means to his ends
often bordered, not on the ludicrous, but the insane.

He attempted to reduce the free Netherlands to slavery and to papacy.
Before his death they had expanded into an independent republic, with a
policy founded upon religious toleration and the rights of man. He had
endeavoured all his life to exclude the Bearnese from his heritage and to
place himself or his daughter on the vacant throne; before his death
Henry IV. was the most powerful and popular sovereign that had ever
reigned in France. He had sought to invade and to conquer England, and to
dethrone and assassinate its queen. But the queen outwitted,
outgeneralled, and outlived, him; English soldiers and sailors, assisted.
by their Dutch comrades in arms, accomplished on the shores of Spain what
the Invincible Armada had in vain essayed against England and Holland;
while England, following thenceforth the opposite system to that of
absolutism and the Inquisition, became, after centuries of struggles
towards the right, the most powerful, prosperous, and enlightened kingdom
in the world.

His exchequer, so full when he ascended the throne as to excite the awe
of contemporary financiers, was reduced before his death to a net income
of some four millions of dollars. His armies; which had been the wonder
of the age in the earlier period of his reign for discipline, courage,
and every quality on which military efficiency depends, were in his later
years a horde of starving, rebellious brigands, more formidable to their
commanders than to the foe. Mutiny was the only organised military
institution that was left in his dominions, while the Spanish
Inquisition, which it was the fell purpose of his life from youth upwards
to establish over the world, became a loathsome and impossible nuisance
everywhere but in its natal soil.

If there be such a thing as historical evidence, then is Philip II.,
convicted before the tribunal of impartial posterity of every crime
charged in his indictment. He lived seventy-one years and three months,
he reigned forty-three years. He endured the martyrdom of his last
illness with the heroism of a saint, and died in the certainty of
immortal bliss as the reward of his life of evil.

ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

A despot really keeps no accounts, nor need to do so
All Italy was in his hands
Every one sees what you seem, few perceiv