became in a manner French by the accession of the House of
Bourbon, the Netherlands reverted once more to Austria itself;
and from thence the powers of Europe advanced, almost in our
own days, to assail France as a republic; and on this ground,
on the plains of Fleurus, was won the first of those great
victories which, for nearly twenty years, carried the French
standards triumphantly over Europe. Thus the marriage recorded
by Comines has been working busily down to our very own times:
it is only since the settlement of 1814, and that more recent
one of 1830, that the Netherlands have ceased to be effected by
the union of Charles the Bold's daughter with Maximilian of
Austria"--P. 148.

Again, in order to understand the contest which Philip de Comines
records between a Frenchman and a Spaniard for the crown of Naples, we
must go back to the dark and bloody page in the annals of the thirteenth
century, which relates the extinction of the last heir of the great
Swabian race of Hohenstauffen by Charles of Anjou, the fit and
unrelenting instrument of Papal hatred--the dreadful expiation of that
great crime by the Sicilian Vespers, the establishment of the House of
Anjou in Sicily, the crimes and misfortunes of Queen Joanna, the new
contest occasioned by her adoption--all these events must be known to
him who would understand the expedition of Charles VIII. The following
passage is an admirable description of the reasons which lend to the
pages of Philip de Comines a deep and melancholy interest:--

"The Memoirs of Philip de Comines terminate about twenty years
before the Reformation, six years after the first voyage of
Columbus. They relate, then, to a tranquil period immediately
preceding a period of extraordinary movement; to the last stage