let and woollen bargeman's waistcoat. It was justly objected to his
clothes, by the euphuistic Fulke Greville, that a meanborn student of the
Inns of Court would have been ashamed to walk about London streets in
them.

And now the engineering son of that shabbily-dressed personage had been
giving the whole world lessons in the science of war, and was fairly
perfecting the work which William and his great contemporaries had so
well begun. But if all this had been merely doing great things without
greatness, there was one man in the Netherlands who knew what grandeur
was. He was not a citizen of the disobedient republic, however, but a
loyal subject of the obedient provinces, and his name was John Baptist
Houwaerts, an eminent schoolmaster of Brussels. He was still more eminent
as a votary of what was called "Rhetoric" and as an arranger of triumphal
processions and living pictures.

The arrival of Archduke Ernest at the seat of the provincial Government
offered an opportunity, which had long been wanting, for a display of
John Baptist's genius. The new viceroy was in so shattered a condition of
health, so crippled with the gout, as to be quite unable to stand, and it
required the services of several lackeys to lift him into and out of his
carriage. A few days of repose therefore were indispensable to him before
he could make his "joyous entrance" into the capital. But the day came at
last, and the exhibition was a masterpiece.

It might have seemed that the abject condition of the Spanish
provinces--desolate, mendicant, despairing--would render holiday making
impossible. But although almost every vestige of the ancient institutions
had vanished from the obedient Netherlands as a reward for their
obedience; although to civil and religious liberty, law, order, and a
thriving commercial and manufacturing existence, such as had been rarely
witnessed in the world, had succeeded the absolute tyranny of Jesuits,
universal beggary, and a perennial military mutiny--setting Government at
defiance and plundering the people--there was one faithful never deserted
Belgica, and that was Rhetoric.

Neither the magnificence nor the pedantry of the spectacles by which the
entry of the mild and inefficient Ernest into Brussels and Antwerp was
now solemnized had ever been surpassed. The town councils, stimulated by
hopes absolutely without foundation as to great results to follow the
advent of the emperor's brother, had voted large sums