and their murmurs about results at another; with their 'I
thought that the battle should be fought,' or, 'It was my opinion that
the occasion ought not to be lost.'"

On the whole, the Duke of Alva was inferior to no general of his age.
As a disciplinarian, he was foremost in Spain, perhaps in Europe.
A spendthrift of time, he was an economist of blood; and this was,
perhaps, in the eye of humanity, his principal virtue.... Such were
his qualities as a military commander. As a statesman, he had neither
experience nor talent. As a man, his character was simple. He did not
combine a great variety of vices; but those which he had were colossal,
and he possessed no virtues. He was neither lustful nor intemperate; but
his professed eulogists admitted his enormous avarice, while the world
has agreed that such an amount of stealth and ferocity, of patient
vindictiveness and universal blood-thirstiness, were never found in a
savage beast of the forest, and but rarely in a human bosom.

* * * * *

From "The History of the United Netherlands."

=_140._= SIEGE AND ABANDONMENT OF OSTEND.

The Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabella entered the place in
triumph, if triumph it could be called. It would be difficult to
imagine a more desolate scene. The artillery of the first years of the
seventeenth century was not the terrible enginery of destruction that
it has become in the last third of the nineteenth, but a cannonade,
continued so steadily and so long, had done its work. There were no
churches, no houses, no redoubts, no bastions, no walls, nothing but a
vague and confused mass of ruin. Spinola conducted his imperial guests
along the edge of extinct volcanoes, amid upturned cemeteries, through
quagmires, which once were moats, over huge mounds of sand, and vast
shapeless masses of bricks and masonry, which had been forts. He
endeavored to point out places where mines had been exploded, where
ravelins had been stormed, where the assailants had been successful, and
where they had been bloodily repulsed. But it was all loathsome, hideous
rubbish. There were no human habitations, no hovels, no casemates. The
inhabitants had burrowed at last in the earth, like the dumb creatures
of the swamps and forests. In every direction the dykes had burst, and
the sullen wash of the liberated waves, bearing hither and thither
the floating wreck of fascines and machinery, of planks and building
materials, sou