a
thousand apologies for his previous insults, embraced the heroic Don
Ferdinand over and over again, as, arrayed in a plain suit of blue armor,
unadorned save with streaks of his enemies' blood, he returned from
pursuit of the fugitives. So complete and so sudden was the victory, that
it was found impossible to account for it, save on the ground of
miraculous interposition. Like Joshua, in the vale of Ajalon, Don
Ferdinand was supposed to have commanded the sun to stand still for a
season, and to have been obeyed. Otherwise, how could the passage of the
river, which was only concluded at six in the evening, and the complete
overthrow of the Protestant forces, have all been accomplished within the
narrow space of an April twilight? The reply of the Duke to Henry the
Second of France, who questioned him subsequently upon the subject, is
well known. "Your Majesty, I was too much occupied that evening with what
was taking place on the earth beneath, to pay much heed to the evolutions
of the heavenly bodies." Spared as he had been by his good fortune from
taking any part in the Algerine expedition, or in witnessing the
ignominious retreat from Innspruck, he was obliged to submit to the
intercalation of the disastrous siege of Metz in the long history of his
successes. Doing the duty of a field-marshal and a sentinel, supporting
his army by his firmness and his discipline when nothing else could have
supported them, he was at last enabled, after half the hundred thousand
men with whom Charles had begun the siege had been sacrificed, to induce
his imperial master to raise the siege before the remaining fifty
thousand had been frozen or starved to death.

The culminating career of Alva seemed to have closed in the mist which
gathered around the setting star of the empire. Having accompanied Philip
to England in 1554, on his matrimonial-expedition, he was destined in the
following years, as viceroy and generalissimo of Italy, to be placed in a
series of false positions. A great captain engaged in a little war, the
champion of the cross in arms against the successor of St. Peter, he had
extricated himself, at last, with his usual adroitness, but with very
little glory. To him had been allotted the mortification, to another the
triumph. The lustre of his own name seemed to sink in the ocean while
that of a hated rival, with new spangled ore, suddenly "flamed in the
forehead of the morning sky." While he had been paltering with a