John Baptist's genius. The new viceroy was in so shattered a condition of
health, so crippled with the gout, as to be quite unable to stand, and it
required the services of several lackeys to lift him into and out of his
carriage. A few days of repose therefore were indispensable to him before
he could make his "joyous entrance" into the capital. But the day came at
last, and the exhibition was a masterpiece.

It might have seemed that the abject condition of the Spanish
provinces--desolate, mendicant, despairing--would render holiday making
impossible. But although almost every vestige of the ancient institutions
had vanished from the obedient Netherlands as a reward for their
obedience; although to civil and religious liberty, law, order, and a
thriving commercial and manufacturing existence, such as had been rarely
witnessed in the world, had succeeded the absolute tyranny of Jesuits,
universal beggary, and a perennial military mutiny--setting Government at
defiance and plundering the people--there was one faithful never deserted
Belgica, and that was Rhetoric.

Neither the magnificence nor the pedantry of the spectacles by which the
entry of the mild and inefficient Ernest into Brussels and Antwerp was
now solemnized had ever been surpassed. The town councils, stimulated by
hopes absolutely without foundation as to great results to follow the
advent of the emperor's brother, had voted large sums and consumed many
days in anxious deliberation upon the manner in which they should be
expended so as most to redound to the honour of Ernest and the reputation
of the country.

In place of the "bloody tragedies of burning, murdering, and ravishing,"
of which the provinces had so long been the theatre, it was resolved
that, "Rhetoric's sweet comedies, amorous jests, and farces," should
gladden all eyes and hearts. A stately procession of knights and burghers
in historical and mythological costumes, followed by ships, dromedaries,
elephants, whales, giants, dragons, and other wonders of the sea and
shore, escorted the archduke into the city. Every street and square was
filled with triumphal arches, statues and platforms, on which the most
ingenious and thoroughly classical living pictures were exhibited. There
was hardly an eminent deity of Olympus, or hero of ancient history, that
was not revived and made visible to mortal eyes in the person of Ernestus
of Austria.

On a framework fifty-five feet high and thirty-three fe