to have been well pleased. If they
were so, it must be confessed that they were thankful for small favors.
They had asked to have the Catholic religion introduced into Holland and
Zealand. The Prince had simply referred them to the estates of these
provinces. They had asked him to guarantee that the exercise of the
Reformed religion should not be "procured" in the rest of the country. He
had merely promised that the Catholic worship should not be prevented.
The difference between the terms of the request and the reply was
sufficiently wide.

The consent to his journey was with difficulty accorded by the estates of
Holland and Zealand, and his wife, with many tears and anxious
forebodings, beheld him depart for a capital where the heads of his brave
and powerful friends had fallen, and where still lurked so many of his
deadly foes. During his absence, prayers were offered daily for his
safety in all the churches of Holland and Zealand, by command of the
estates.

He arrived at Antwerp on the 17th of September, and was received with
extraordinary enthusiasm. The Prince, who had gone forth alone, without
even a bodyguard, had the whole population of the great city for his
buckler. Here he spent five days, observing, with many a sigh, the
melancholy changes which had taken place in the long interval of his
absence. The recent traces of the horrible "Fury," the blackened walls of
the Hotel de Ville, the prostrate ruins of the marble streets, which he
had known as the most imposing in Europe, could be hardly atoned for in
his eyes even by the more grateful spectacle of the dismantled fortress.

On the 23rd of September he was attended by a vast concourse of citizens
to the new canal which led to Brussels, where three barges were in
waiting for himself and suite. In one a banquet was spread; in the
second, adorned with emblematic devices and draped with the banners of
the seventeen provinces, he was to perform the brief journey; while the
third had been filled by the inevitable rhetoric societies, with all the
wonders of their dramatic and plastic ingenuity. Rarely had such a
complication of vices and virtues, of crushed dragons, victorious
archangels, broken fetters, and resurgent nationalities, been seen
before, within the limits of a single canal boat. The affection was,
however, sincere, and the spirit noble, even though the taste which
presided at these remonstrations may have been somewhat pedantic.

The Prince was