vanished from the obedient Netherlands as a reward for their obedience;
although to civil and religious liberty, law, order, and a thriving
commercial and manufacturing existence, such as had been rarely witnessed
in the world, had succeeded the absolute tyranny of Jesuits, universal
beggary, and a perennial military mutiny--setting Government at defiance
and plundering the people--there was one faithful never deserted Belgica,
and that was Rhetoric.

Neither the magnificence nor the pedantry of the spectacles by which the
entry of the mild and inefficient Ernest into Brussels and Antwerp was
now solemnized had ever been surpassed. The town councils, stimulated by
hopes absolutely without foundation as to great results to follow the
advent of the emperor's brother, had voted large sums and consumed many
days in anxious deliberation upon the manner in which they should be
expended so as most to redound to the honour of Ernest and the reputation
of the country.

In place of the "bloody tragedies of burning, murdering, and ravishing,"
of which the provinces had so long been the theatre, it was resolved
that, "Rhetoric's sweet comedies, amorous jests, and farces," should
gladden all eyes and hearts. A stately procession of knights and
burghers in historical and mythological costumes, followed by ships,
dromedaries, elephants, whales, giants, dragons, and other wonders of
the sea and shore, escorted the archduke into the city. Every street and
square was filled with triumphal arches, statues and platforms, on which
the most ingenious and thoroughly classical living pictures were
exhibited. There was hardly an eminent deity of Olympus, or hero of
ancient history, that was not revived and made visible to mortal eyes
in the person of Ernestus of Austria.