sense. Certainly, they would have been highly
useful virtues to him at that moment. The prince who had just taken
Gertruydenberg, and was then besieging Groningen, was manifesting his
share of audacity, velocity, and other good gifts on even a wider
platform than that erected for Ernest by John Baptist Houwaerts; and
there was an admirable opportunity for both to develope their respective
characteristics for the world's judgment.

Meantime the impersonation of the gentle and very gouty invalid as
Apollo, as Perseus, as the feather-heeled Mercury, was highly applauded
by the burghers of Brussels.

And so the dreamer dreamed on, and the discreet nymph continued to
discourse, until John Baptist, starting suddenly from his trance beheld
that it was all a truth and no vision. Ernest was really about to enter
the Netherlands, and with him the millennium. The pedant therefore
proceeded to his desk, and straightway composed the very worst poem that
had ever been written in any language, even Flemish.

There were thousands of lines in it, and not a line without a god or a
goddess.

Mars, Nemesis, and Ate, Pluto, Rhadamanthus, and Minos, the Fates and the
Furies, together with Charon, Calumnia, Bellona, and all such
objectionable divinities, were requested to disappear for ever from the
Low Countries; while in their stead were confidently invoked Jupiter,
Apollo, Triptolemus, and last, though not least, Rhetorica.

Enough has been said of this raree-show to weary the reader's patience,
but not more than enough to show the docile and enervated nature of this
portion of a people who had lost everything for which men cherish their
fatherland, but who could still find relief--after thirty years of
horrible civil war in painted pageantry, Latin versification, and the
classical dictionary.

Yet there was nothing much more important achieved by the archduke in the
brief period for which his administration was destined to endure. Three
phenomena chiefly marked his reign, but his own part in the three was
rather a passive than an active one--mutiny, assassination, and
negotiation--the two last attempted on a considerable scale but ending
abortively.

It is impossible to exaggerate the misery of the obedient provinces at
this epoch. The insane attempt of the King of Spain, with such utterly
inadequate machinery, to conquer the world has been sufficiently dilated
upon. The Spanish and Italian and Walloon soldiers were starving in