go to mass, and to enjoy many of the pleasures of youth. But he had been
always a prisoner, and his soul--a hopeless captive--could no longer be
liberated now that the tyrant, in order to further his own secret
purposes; had at last released his body from gaol. Although the eldest-
born of his father, and the inheritor of the great estates of Orange and
of Buren, he was no longer a Nassau except in name. The change wrought
by the pressure of the Spanish atmosphere was complete. All that was
left of his youthful self was a passionate reverence for his father's
memory, strangely combined with a total indifference to all that his
father held dear, all for which his father had laboured his whole
lifetime, and for which his heart's blood had been shed. On being at
last set free from bondage he had been taken to the Escorial, and
permitted to kiss the hand of the king--that hand still reeking with his
father's murder. He had been well received by the Infante and the
Infanta, and by the empress-mother, daughter of Charles V., while the
artistic treasures of the palace and cloister were benignantly pointed
out to him. It was also signified to him that he was to receive the
order of the Golden Fleece, and to enter into possession of his paternal
and maternal estates. And Philip William had accepted these conditions
as if a born loyal subject of his Most Catholic Majesty.

Could better proof be wanting that in that age religion was the only
fatherland, and that a true papist could sustain no injury at the hands
of his Most Catholic Majesty. If to be kidnapped in boyhood, to be
imprisoned during a whole generation of mankind, to be deprived of vast
estates, and to be made orphan by the foulest of assassinations, could
not engender resentment against, the royal, perpetrator of these crimes
in the bosom of his victim, was it strange that Philip should deem
himself, something far, more than man, and should placidly accept the
worship rendered to him by inferior beings, as to the holy impersonation