the Silent. His genius was adroit and subtle, but not profound. He
aimed at power by making the powerful subservient, but he had not the
intellect which deals in the daylight face to face with great events and
great minds. In the violent political struggle of which his
administration consisted, he was foiled and thrown by the superior
strength of a man whose warfare was open and manly, and who had no
defence against the poisoned weapons of his foe.

His literary accomplishments were very great. His fecundity was
prodigious, and he wrote at will in seven languages. 'This polyglot
facility was not in itself a very remarkable circumstance, for it grew
out of his necessary education and geographical position. Few men in
that age and region were limited to their mother tongue. The Prince of
Orange, who made no special pretence to learning, possessed at least five
languages. Egmont, who was accounted an ignorant man, was certainly
familiar with three. The Cardinal, however, wrote not only with ease,
but with remarkable elegance, vigor and vivacity, in whatever language he
chose to adopt. The style of his letters and other documents, regarded
simply as compositions, was inferior to that of no writer of the age.
His occasional orations, too, were esteemed models of smooth and flowing
rhetoric, at an epoch when the art of eloquence was not much cultivated.
Yet it must be allowed that beneath all the shallow but harmonious flow
of his periods, it would be idle to search for a grain of golden sand.
Not a single sterling, manly thought is to be found in all his
productions. If at times our admiration is excited with the appearance
of a gem of true philosophy, we are soon obliged to acknowledge, on
closer inspection, that we have been deceived by a false glitter. In
retirement, his solitude was not relieved by serious application to any
branch of knowledge. Devotion to science and to the advancement of
learning, a virtue which has changed the infamy of even baser natures