accomplished, and for a longtime Naarden ceased to exist.

Alva wrote, with his usual complacency in such cases, to his sovereign,
that "they had cut the throats of the burghers and all the garrison, and
that they had not left a mother's son alive." The statement was almost
literally correct, nor was the cant with which these bloodhounds
commented upon their crimes less odious than their guilt. "It was a
permission of God," said the Duke, "that these people should have
undertaken to defend a city, which was so weak that no other persons
would have attempted such a thing." Nor was the reflection of Mendoza
less pious. "The sack of Naarden," said that really brave and
accomplished cavalier, "was a chastisement which must be believed to have
taken place by express permission of a Divine Providence; a punishment
for having been the first of the Holland towns in which heresy built
its nest, whence it has taken flight to all the neighboring cities."

It is not without reluctance, but still with a stern determination, that
the historian--should faithfully record these transactions. To extenuate
would be base; to exaggerate impossible. It is good that the world
should not forget how much wrong has been endured by a single harmless
nation at the hands of despotism, and in the sacred name of God. There
have been tongues and pens enough to narrate the excesses of the people,
bursting from time to time out of slavery into madness. It is good, too,
that those crimes should be remembered, and freshly pondered; but it is
equally wholesome to study the opposite picture. Tyranny, ever young and
ever old, constantly reproducing herself with the same stony features,
with the same imposing mask which she has worn through all the ages,
can never be too minutely examined, especially when she paints her own
portrait, and when the secret history of her guilt is furnished by the
confessions of her lovers. The perusal of her traits will not make us