as the Hotel de Cuylembourg, covered the same site. Beneath
its roof the Protestant Confederates, in 1566, drew up their memorable
"Request" to Margaret of Parma; and at one of its windows these
"Beggars," being dismissed with such contumelious scorn from the
presence of the Regent, nobly converted the stigma into a war-cry; and,
with the wallet of the "Gueux" slung across their shoulders, drank out
of wooden porringers a benison on the cause of the emancipation of the
United Provinces. So prompted to think of these stirring times, we are
carried by the steep declivity of a few streets to that magnificent Town
Hall, where, only eleven years before the occurrences in the Hotel
Cuylembourg, Charles V. had resigned into the hands of his son Philip
the sovereignty of an extensive and flourishing empire. All that could
be achieved by the energy of a mind confident of its own force and
clearness--by a strong will wielding enormous resources of power--by
prudence listening to, and able to balance, cautious experience, and
fearless impetuosity--and by consummate skill in the art of government,
had been laboriously and successfully achieved by Charles. To Philip he
transferred the most fertile, delightful, opulent, and industrious
countries of Europe--Spain and the Netherlands, Milan and Naples. His
African possessions included Tunis and Oran, the Cape Verd and Canary
islands. The Moluccas, the Philippine and Sunda islands heaped his
storehouses with the spices, and fruits, and prolific vegetable riches
of the Indian Ocean; while from the New World, the mines of Mexico,
Chili, and Potosi poured into his treasury their tributary floods of
gold. His mighty fleet was still an invincible armada; and his army,
inured to war, and accustomed to victory under heroic captains, upheld
the wide renown of the Spanish infantry. But neither the abilities nor
the auspicious fortunes of Charles were inherited with this vast
dominion by Philip. It is almost a mystery the crumbling away during his
reign of such wealth and such strength. To read the riddle, we must know
Philip. The biography which we shall now hurriedly sketch, of one of his
most eminent favourites and ministers, who was, also, one of the most
remarkable men that ever lived, enables us to see further into the
breast of the gloomy, jealous, and cruel king, than we could hope to do
by the less penetrating light of general history.

It was in the course of the year 1594, that the moth