blasted and forlorn condition of the provinces.
"This sick man will die in our arms," he said, "without our wishing to
kill him." He also left no doubt in the royal mind as to the utter
incompetency of the archduke for his office. Although he had much
Christianity, amiability, and good intentions, he was so unused to
business, so slow and so lazy, so easily persuaded by those around him,
as to be always falling into errors. He was the servant of his own
servants, particularly of those least disposed to the king's service and
most attentive to their own interests. He had endeavoured to make himself
beloved by the natives of the country, while the very reverse of this had
been the result.

"As to his agility and the strength of his body," said the Spaniard, as
if he were thinking of certain allegories which were to mark the
archduke's triumphal entry, "they are so deficient as to leave him unfit
for arms. I consider him incapable of accompanying an army to the field,
and we find him so new to all such affairs as constitute government and
the conduct of warlike business, that he could not steer his way without
some one to enlighten and direct him."

It was sometimes complained of in those days--and the thought has even
prolonged itself until later times--that those republicans of the United
Netherlands had done and could do great things; but that, after all,
there was no grandeur about them. Certainly they had done great things.
It was something to fight the Ocean for ages, and patiently and firmly to
shut him out from his own domain. It was something to extinguish the
Spanish Inquisition--a still more cruel and devouring enemy than the sea.
It was something that the fugitive spirit of civil and religious liberty
had found at last its most substantial and steadfast home upon those
storm-washed shoals and shifting sandbanks.

It was something to come to the rescue of England in her great agony, and
help to save her from invasion. It was something to do more than any
nation but England, and as much as she, to assist Henry the Huguenot to
the throne of his ancestors and to preserve the national unity of France
which its own great ones had imperilled. It was something to found two
magnificent universities, cherished abodes of science and of antique
lore, in the midst of civil commotions and of resistance to foreign
oppression. It was something, at the same period, to lay the foundation
of a systew of common schools--so cheap