little series of _tales by the roadside_. The charming interest of one of
them is worth a whole volume of lumbering history of a revolution or royal
line. Mr. Grattan, too, has taken all the Low Countries to himself, and
the literature of their life belongs to him. The other day he published a
history of the Netherlands (noticed in the last volume of the _Mirror_,
page 257); and here we have him again, with _The Heiress of Bruges_, a
tale of the year 1600.

The main story needs not be told; but a scene may be easily detached, to
show what spirit-stirring scenes may be expected throughout the work. It
needs only be premised that Beatrice, in our extract, is the co-heroine of
the _Heiress of Bruges_, and is sacrificed by the Inquisition in
Brussels:--

A law of the Emperor Charles V., passed half a century before, had decreed
the frightful punishment of living burial against female heretics, and
many executions of the kind had varied by their bloodless atrocity the
horrid butcheries committed all through the Low Countries during the
tyranny of Alva. After that period such sacrifices had been less frequent;
but as late as three years before the date of our story, an instance of
this barbarity had publicly taken place in Brussels, by the orders of
Albert, who at that time held the highest dignity of the Christian
priesthood, next to that of its supreme head. A poor servant girl, named
Anne Vanderhove, arrested on a charge of heresy, refused, in all the pride
of martyrdom, to renounce her faith. She was condemned to the grave--not
to the common occupancy of that cold refuge of the lifeless body, but to
all the horrors of living contact and hopeless struggles with the
suffocating clay. She suffered her punishment, in the midst of a crowd of
curious fanatics; but such was the disgust inspired by the spectacle, that
it was thought impolitic to hazard in the face of day another exhibition