Spain had lost the Low Countries. Seven of those provinces had already entirely emancipated themselves from her empire, and formed, under the style of the United Provinces, a republic which took rank among the Powers of Europe. Philip II. still waged against his former subjects a feeble and hopeless war; but he was on the brink of the grave, and a few years later his son Philip III. concluded at the Hague, under the name of a twelve years' truce, to save the last pang of royal pride, a treaty which was in fact a recognition of the independence of Holland and a peace. The other provinces of Flanders had indeed remained faithful to the Romish Church, but they were not the less alienated from the Spanish monarchy; Philip, not being able to govern them as he wished, desisted from governing them altogether, and handed over the sovereignty of the country to his eldest daughter, the Infanta Isabella, married to the Austrian Archduke Albert-a prince who had been a cardinal, but who shook off the ties of the Church to become a sovereign. In 1599 the Infanta and her husband reigned in Brussels, under the joint title of the Archdukes.' Thus the country of Charles V.,-those magnificent provinces for which Philip II. had laboured incessantly for forty years, where he had wrought so many acts of iniquity and of horror,—where he had inflicted such incalculable sufferings and roused such indomitable hatreds, were, at the close of his long career, either lost altogether to the crown of Spain, or transferred to the German branch of his house, with the single reservation that they were to revert to the royal line in the event of a failure of issue from their new rulers.

Abroad, and especially in his relations with France, the designs and the efforts of Philip II. had proved equally vain He had ardently fomented in France the two curses of religious persecution and of civil war, He had supported the Ligue and the Guises in their most factious plots to such an excess, that the Pope himself, and that Pope Sixtus V., repudiated his policy, and said to Louis of Gonzaga, Duc de Nevers, In what school have you learnt that it is well to form parties against the will of their lawful sovereign? I am much afraid that things may 'be brought to such a pass, that the King of France, Catholic he is, may be compelled to call for the aid of heretics to rescue him from the tyranny of the Catholics.' Whilst Henry III. was still alive, Philip, in his eagerness to exclude Henry IV. from the throne, had concluded a formal treaty with the Guises, by which they mutually bound themselves that none should ever reign in France either himself a heretic, or who being king should concede public impunity to heretics.' After the

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assassination of Henry III., Philip, burning with the twofold ardour of secular ambition and religious zeal, had recommended the party of the Ligue to call to the throne his own daughter Isabella, and he ordered the Duke of Parma to enter France with his army to support the Ligue at all hazardseven at the risk of losing the Low Countries. The Duke of Parma by two able campaigns did succeed in checking the progress of Henry IV., and still held the crown of France on the cast of a die. At the States General, assembled at Paris in 1593, Philip II. felt the full extent of his power; the faction of the Seize had formally offered the throne to himself or to some one of his descendants. Yet but a few months after this explosion of Spanish fanaticism, Henry IV. entered Paris the bearer of victory and peace. Two years later, Mayenne and the Ligue made their submission. In the following year Philip himself entered into negotiation with Henry of Bourbon; and on the 2nd of May, 1598, the ambassadors of Spain signed the peace of Vervins, two weeks after Henry IV. had promulgated liberty of conscience to the Protestants by the Edict of Nantes -a measure far from complete, but greatly in advance of the prevailing spirit of those times, and which was the signal stamp and seal of the defeat of Philip II., the confusion of his maxims, and the ruin of his pretensions.

In his relations with England, the King had undergone reverses, not more bitter, perhaps, but even more direct and more terrible. His plots with Mary Stuart, sometimes designed to marry her to the Infant Don Carlos, sometimes to deliver her from captivity, and to place her on the throne of England, 'whether Queen Elizabeth died a natural death or by any other 'kind of chance,' had ended in a more tragical and disastrous failure than his French intrigues with the house of Guise. He had seen the most powerful armament which had ever sailed from the ports of Spain-the Invincible Armada itself-scattered and destroyed in a few days before the blasts of the tempest and the valour of English seamen. English cruizers had on several Occasions ravaged the coasts of Spain, and not long before Essex had taken and pillaged the city of Cadiz, Philip being unable to repel these attacks or to avenge these insults. Nay, it was with repugnance that Elizabeth consented, on the solicitation of Henry IV., to join in the peace of Vervins,―a peace far more necessary to Philip than to herself, and far more eagerly desired by Spain than by England.

Scarcely was this peace signed when the King died, mutilated in his possessions, defeated in his political and religious ambition, humbled in his pride, leaving the Spanish monarchy enfeebled

and depressed. Its neighbours, who had been his obsequious allies or his timid antagonists, were now its conquerors; and the contested acquisition of the crown of Portugal was the sole compensation which remained for so many losses and reverses. To this had Philip II., in a reign of forty-two years, brought the monarchy of Charles V.

Was, then, this decline an accident in the destinies of Spain, the fault of an individual, the result of the mistaken but transient policy of a single reign? To answer this question we must extend our survey; and as we have already passed from the accession to the death of Philip, let us descend from the death of Philip to the present time. The great witnesses of history are events examined by the light of ages. What has the monarchy of Charles V. become since the commencement of that decay already so perceptible under the sceptre of his son?

Beyond the confines of Europe, in America, there is no more Spain; all her conquests have shaken off her yoke, all her establishments have escaped from her authority. One splendid possession alone remains to her,-the Island of Cuba, the queen of the Antilles; but that possession is already precarious, day by day more coveted and more assailed by the United States, neighbours as powerful as they are ambitious, as daring as they are powerful, and which pursue the track of conquest like those mighty rivers that extend their course and overflow their boundaries by the incalculable volume of their waters.

The Spanish colonies, now severed from the mother country, have not become to Spain what the United States have become to England, a wide and wealthy market, a swarm of active and industrious settlers who have left the hive, but who, in spite of their rivalry, are still united to their parent State by habit, by interest, and by conformity of tastes, in close, manifold, and productive intercourse. The colonies of Spain have sought to become free States. But Spain has given them none of the principles, the traditions, and the examples of liberty. They have conquered their independence only to fall into a state of anarchy, a state of anarchy not less unfruitful than their former servitude. The most subversive notions, the most uncontrolled passions, are propagated and indulged without restraint and without success in the immense dismembered territories of what was once the Spanish empire. Catholics in name, these nations are infested by the excess of licentiousness and infidelity; they are the chief consumers of the cynical productions of the profligate incredulity of the last century, the refuse of our own.. Spain has taught her colonies to defend and

maintain her faith as ill as she taught them to establish and to exercise their own freedom.

In the North of Africa, whither she had first driven and afterwards pursued the Moors, Spain has long since retired before the descendants of that conquered people; the conquests of Charles V. and Cardinal Ximenes have been abandoned: nothing remains to her on that coast but one or two miserable receptacles for outlaws and convicts.

Upon the native soil of Spain, in that magnificent peninsula which is bounded by the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic Ocean, the prosperity and grandeur of the monarchy have shared the same fate. Two royal races, once the proudest rivals in glory and in power, the house of Austria and the house of Bourbon, have occupied that throne; both of them have left the Spanish nation in weakness and in apathy; the descendants of Louis XIV. degenerated at Madrid as rapidly as the descendants of Charles V. Under their administration Spain has witnessed the decline of her industry and wealth, of her armies, of her fleets, of her finances, of her literature as well as of her policy, of the mind as well as of the State. The well-meant but incoherent and incomplete reforms attempted by Charles III. disguised for a moment the ruin they failed to arrest. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been to Spain two centuries of servile government, of disorganisation, of waning life.

Has, then, this state of intellectual and political torpor in the government and in the nation preserved either one or the other from revolutions? Has stagnation secured durability? Does the soil, which has ceased to bear its increase, forget the shocks of the earthquake? Has the trance of Spain been a period of repose? The world knows it is not so. No sooner has an opportunity occurred, no sooner has some great blast from without swept over Spain, than the daring spirit of the age manifests itself as abruptly as if it had never ceased to haunt the nation; there, as elsewhere, blending gleams of intelligence with clouds and darkness; confounding generous desires with extravagant designs; not less presumptuous, not less ambitious, not less licentious than in those communities where it has long extended its authority and established its empire. No sooner had Spain been roused from her torpor by the call of national honour and of war, than she flung herself into the track of revolutions; her ancient manners, her ancient attachment to the Throne and to the Church are not yet altogether lost; and they have more than once rescued her from the brink of the precipice; they must still play a considerable part in her destinies; but they have failed either to satisfy or to restrain her; they have failed

to prevent the irruption of the revolutionary spirit; they will fail to overcome it; and if Spain emerges from the perils which surround her, she will certainly not return to that authority, alike oppressive and ineffectual, which Philip II. and his successors had imposed upon the nation.

Whilst Spain has fallen into this state of apathy, which has not saved it from anarchy, what has been the fate of those neighbouring States which were in the sixteenth century her subjects or her rivals? What has been the growth, and what have been the results of that growth, in the destinies of the Low Countries, of France, and of England?

Imagine Philip II. returning to Brussels to contemplate the aspect of Belgium-the Belgium of our own times. Instead of those subject provinces, eternally divided and mutually jealous in their common dependence, he would find a kingdom of no very ancient date, but already consolidated by trials of no ordinary gravity, and a Protestant sovereign who has not thought it necessary to abjure the creed in which he was born, but who brings up his children in the faith of Rome, surrounded by the confidence, the respect, and the loyal attachment of a Catholic people; he would find the most entire religious liberty and toleration, proved by the continual and unrestrained expression of different forms of belief and of the fervour of different opinions, with their respective claims and their mutual controversies; he would find the municipal liberties of Flanders still in full vigour and still dear to the population; a vast deal of political freedom, exercised with judgment and moderation in spite of the awkward institutions of the country; immense amount of industry and wealth diffused through all classes of society, and promoting the development of the intelligence as well as the prosperity of the nation. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century what changes have been wrought! what obstacles surmounted! what improvements perfected! Philip would look on such a state of things with extreme surprise; scarcely would he resign himself to believe what he must see before him.

If he passed from Brussels to the Hague he would again encounter a fresh source of astonishment and disappointment. He would see in that spot his oldest and most tenacious enemy -the house of Nassau, tranquilly established on a throne, surrounded and supported by all the liberties, whether ancient or modern, of that country. The Protestant Low Countries have triumphantly survived, in the course of the last three centuries, the rudest trials ever inflicted on a people. Under a Republican form of government, they conquered, with infinite toil and