compliments for her past services, accompanied, however,
with a less barren and more acceptable acknowledgment, in the shape of a
life income of 14,000 ducats instead of the 8000 hitherto enjoyed by her
Highness.

In addition to this liberal allowance, of which she was never to be
deprived, except upon receiving full payment of 140,000 ducats, she was
presented with 25,000 florins by the estates of Brabant, and with 30,000
by those of Flanders.

With these substantial tokens of the success of her nine years' fatigue
and intolerable anxiety, she at last took her departure from the
Netherlands, having communicated the dissolution of her connexion with
the provinces by a farewell letter to the Estates dated 9th December,
1567. Within a few weeks afterwards, escorted by the Duke of Alva across
the frontier of Brabant; attended by a considerable deputation of Flemish
nobility into Germany, and accompanied to her journey's end at Parma by
the Count and Countess of Mansfeld, she finally closed her eventful
career in the Netherlands.

The horrors of the succeeding administration proved beneficial to her
reputation. Upon the dark ground of succeeding years the lines which
recorded her history seemed written with letters of light. Yet her
conduct in the Netherlands offers but few points for approbation, and
many for indignant censure. That she was not entirely destitute of
feminine softness and sentiments of bounty, her parting despatch to her
brother proved. In that letter she recommended to him a course of
clemency and forgiveness, and reminded him that the nearer kings approach
to God in station, the more they should endeavor to imitate him in his
attributes of benignity. But the language of this farewell was more
tender than had been the spirit of her government. One looks in vain,
too, through the general atmosphere of kindness which pervades the
epistle; for a special recommendation of those distinguished and doomed
seigniors, whose attachment to her person and whose chivalrous and
conscientious endeavors to fulfil her own orders, had placed them upon
the edge of that precipice from which they were shortly to be hurled. The
men who had restrained her from covering herself with disgrace by a
precipitate retreat from the post of danger, and who had imperilled their
lives by obedience to her express instructions, had been long languishing
in solitary confinement, never to be terminated except by a traitor's
death--yet we se