Philip II. was also the age of William of Orange and his four brethren,
of Sainte Aldegonde, of Olden-Barneveldt, of Duplessis-Mornay, La Noue,
Coligny, of Luther, Melancthon, and Calvin, Walsingham, Sidney, Raleigh,
Queen Elizabeth, of Michael Montaigne, and William Shakspeare. It was
not an age of blindness, but of glorious light. If the man whom the
Maker of the Universe had permitted to be born to such boundless
functions, chose to put out his own eyes that he might grope along his
great pathway of duty in perpetual darkness, by his deeds he must be
judged. The King perhaps firmly believed that the heretics of the
Netherlands, of France, or of England, could escape eternal perdition
only by being extirpated from the earth by fire and sword, and therefore;
perhaps, felt it his duty to devote his life to their extermination.
But he believed, still more firmly, that his own political authority,
throughout his dominions, and his road to almost universal empire, lay
over the bodies of those heretics. Three centuries have nearly past
since this memorable epoch; and the world knows the fate of the states
which accepted the dogma which it was Philip's life-work to enforce, and
of those who protested against the system. The Spanish and Italian
Peninsulas have had a different history from that which records the
career of France, Prussia, the Dutch Commonwealth, the British Empire,
the Transatlantic Republic.

Yet the contest between those Seven meagre Provinces upon the sand-banks
of the North Sea, and--the great Spanish Empire, seemed at the moment
with which we are now occupied a sufficiently desperate one. Throw a
glance upon the map of Europe. Look at the broad magnificent Spanish
Peninsula, stretching across eight degrees of latitude and ten of
longitude, commanding the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, with a genial
climate, warmed in winter by the vast furnace of Africa, and protected
from the scorching heats of summer by shady mountain and forest, and