ved the laws and
customs of his native country. With Philip, the case was far
different, and the results too obvious. Uninformed on the Belgian
character, despising the state of manners, and ignorant of the
language, no sympathy attached him to the people. He brought
with him to the throne all the hostile prejudices of a foreigner,
without one of the kindly or considerate feelings of a compatriot.

Spain, where this young prince had hitherto passed his life, was
in some degree excluded from European civilization. A contest of
seven centuries between the Mohammedan tribes and the descendants
of the Visigoths, cruel, like all civil wars, and, like all those
of religion, not merely a contest of rulers, but essentially of
the people, had given to the manners and feelings of this unhappy
country a deep stamp of barbarity. The ferocity of military
chieftains had become the basis of the government and laws. The
Christian kings had adopted the perfidious and bloody system of
the despotic sultans they replaced. Magnificence and tyranny,
power and cruelty, wisdom and dissimulation, respect and fear,
were inseparably associated in the minds of a people so governed.
They comprehended nothing in religion but a God armed with
omnipotence and vengeance, or in politics but a king as terrible
as the deity he represented.

Philip, bred in this school of slavish superstition, taught that he
was the despot for whom it was formed, familiar with the degrading
tactics of eastern tyranny, was at once the most contemptible
and unfortunate of men. Isolated from his kind, and wishing to
appear superior to those beyond whom his station had placed him,
he was insensible to the affections which soften and ennoble
human nature. He was perpetually filled with one idea--that of
his greatness; he had but one ambition--that of command; but
one enjoyment--that of exciting fear. Victim to this revolting
selfishness, his heart was never free from care; and the bitter
melancholy of his character seemed to nourish a desire of evil-doing,
which irritated suffering often produces in man. Deceit and blood
were his greatest, if not his only, delights. The religious zeal
which he affected, or felt, showed itself but in acts of cruelty;
and the fanatic bigotry which inspired him formed the strongest
contrast to the divine spirit of Christianity.

Nature had endowed this ferocious being with wonderful penetration
and unusual self-command; the first revealing to