ere European academies. It was
something to organize, at the same critical period, on the most skilful
and liberal scale, to carry out with unexampled daring, sagacity, and
fortitude, great voyages of discovery to the polar regions, and to open
new highways for commerce, new treasures for science. Many things of this
nature had been done by the new commonwealth; but, alas! she did not
drape herself melodramatically, nor stalk about with heroic wreath and
cothurn. She was altogether without grandeur.

When Alva had gained his signal victories, and followed them up by those
prodigious massacres which, but for his own and other irrefragable
testimony, would seem too monstrous for belief, he had erected a colossal
statue to himself, attired in the most classical of costumes, and
surrounded with the most mythological of attributes. Here was grandeur.
But William the Silent, after he had saved the republic, for which he had
laboured during his whole lifetime and was destined to pour out his
heart's blood, went about among the brewers and burghers with unbuttoned
doublet and woollen bargeman's waistcoat. It was justly objected to his
clothes, by the euphuistic Fulke Greville, that a meanborn student of the
Inns of Court would have been ashamed to walk about London streets in
them.

And now the engineering son of that shabbily-dressed personage had been
giving the whole world lessons in the science of war, and was fairly
perfecting the work which William and his great contemporaries had so
well begun. But if all this had been merely doing great things without
greatness, there was one man in the Netherlands who knew what grandeur
was. He was not a citizen of the disobedient republic, however, but a
loyal subject of the obedient provinces, and his name was John Baptist
Houwaerts, an eminent schoolmaster of Brussels. He was still more eminent
as a votary of what was called "Rhetoric" and as an arranger of triumphal
processions and living pictures.

The arrival of Archduke Ernest at the seat of the provincial Government
offered an opportunity, which had long been wanting, for a display of
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