ought industriously day by day and year by year, to destroy
each other, and to efface the products of human industry, and yet no
progress could fairly be registered. The Turk was in Buda, on the right
bank of the Danube, and the Christian in Pest, on the left, while the
crescent; but lately supplanted by the cross, again waved in triumph over
Stuhlweissenberg, capital city of the Magyars. The great Marshal Biron,
foiled in his stupendous treachery, had laid down his head upon the
block; the catastrophe following hard upon the madcap riot of Lord Essex
in the Strand and his tragic end. The troublesome and restless favourites
of Henry and of Elizabeth had closed their stormy career, but the designs
of the great king and the great queen were growing wider and wilder, more
false and more fantastic than ever, as the evening shadows of both were
lengthening.

But it was not in Europe nor in Christendom: alone during that twilight
epoch of declining absolutism, regal and sacerdotal, and the coming
glimmer of freedom, religious and commercial, that the contrast between
the old and new civilizations was exhibiting itself.

The same fishermen and fighting men, whom we have but lately seen sailing
forth from Zeeland and Friesland to confront the dangers of either pole,
were now contending in the Indian seas with the Portuguese monopolists of
the tropics.

A century long, the generosity of the Roman pontiff in bestowing upon
others what was not his property had guaranteed to the nation of Vasco de
Gama one half at least of the valuable possessions which maritime genius,
unflinching valour, and boundless cruelty had won and kept. But the
spirit of change was abroad in the world. Potentates and merchants under
the equator had been sedulously taught that there were no other white men
on the planet but the Portuguese and their conquerors the Spaniards, and
that the Dutch--of whom they had recently heard, and the portrait of
whose great military chieftain they had seen after the news of the
Nieuport battle had made the circuit of the earth--were a mere mob of
pirates and savages inhabiting the obscurest of dens. They were soon,
however, to be enabled to judge for themselves as to the power and the
merits of the various competitors for their trade.

Early in this year Andreas Hurtado de Mendoza with a stately fleet of
galleons and smaller vessels, more than five-and-twenty in all, was on
his way towards the island of Java to inflict s