epting the eternal clang of arms, and the
constant participation by themselves and those nearest to them in the
dangers, privations, and horrors of siege and battle-field as the
commonplaces of life. At least, those Netherlanders knew what fighting
for independence of a foreign tyrant meant. They must have hated Spain
very thoroughly, and believed in the right of man to worship God
according to the dictates of his conscience, and to govern himself upon
his own soil, however meagre, very earnestly, or they would hardly have
spent their blood and treasure, year after year; with such mercantile
regularity when it was always in their power to make peace by giving up
the object for which they had been fighting.

Yet the war, although in its old age, was not fallen into decrepitude.
The most considerable and most sanguinary pitched battle of what then
were modern times had just been fought, and the combatants were preparing
themselves for a fresh wrestle, as if the conflict had only begun. And
now--although the great leaguers of Harlem, Leyden, and Antwerp, as well
as the more recent masterpieces of Prince Maurice in Gelderland and
Friesland were still fresh in men's memory--there was to be a siege,
which for endurance, pertinacity, valour, and bloodshed on both sides,
had not yet been foreshadowed, far less equalled, upon the fatal
Netherland soil.

That place of fashionable resort, where the fine folk of Europe now
bathe, and flirt, and prattle politics or scandal so cheerfully during
the summer solstice--cool and comfortable Ostend--was throughout the
sixteenth century as obscure a fishing village as could be found in
Christendom. Nothing, had ever happened there, nobody had ever lived
there, and it was not until a much later period that the famous oyster,
now identified with its name, had been brought to its bay to be educated.
It was known for nothing except for claiming to have invented the
pickling of herrings, which was not at all the fact. Towards the latter
part of the century, however, the poor little open village had been
fortified to such purpose as to enable it to beat off the great Alexander
Farnese, when he had made an impromptu effort to seize it in the year
1583, after his successful enterprise against Dunkirk and Nieuport, and
subsequent preparation had fortunately been made against any further
attempt. For in the opening period of the new century thousands and tens
of thousands were to come to those yello