laboured during his whole lifetime and was destined to pour out his
heart's blood, went about among the brewers and burghers with unbuttoned
doublet and woollen bargeman's waistcoat. It was justly objected to his
clothes, by the euphuistic Fulke Greville, that a meanborn student of the
Inns of Court would have been ashamed to walk about London streets in
them.

And now the engineering son of that shabbily-dressed personage had been
giving the whole world lessons in the science of war, and was fairly
perfecting the work which William and his great contemporaries had so
well begun. But if all this had been merely doing great things without
greatness, there was one man in the Netherlands who knew what grandeur
was. He was not a citizen of the disobedient republic, however, but a
loyal subject of the obedient provinces, and his name was John Baptist
Houwaerts, an eminent schoolmaster of Brussels. He was still more
eminent as a votary of what was called "Rhetoric" and as an arranger of
triumphal processions and living pictures.

The arrival of Archduke Ernest at the seat of the provincial Government
offered an opportunity, which had long been wanting, for a display of
John Baptist's genius. The new viceroy was in so shattered a condition
of health, so crippled with the gout, as to be quite unable to stand, and
it required the services of several lackeys to lift him into and out of
his carriage. A few days of repose therefore were indispensable to him
before he could make his "joyous entrance" into the capital. But the day
came at last, and the exhibition was a masterpiece.

It might have seemed that the abject condition of the Spanish provinces--
desolate, mendicant, despairing--would render holiday making impossible.
But although almost every vestige of the ancient institutions had