Fortunately, that member of Parliament had made the discovery in time--
not for himself, but for Elizabeth--that the "Lord was better pleased
with adverbs than nouns;" the well-known result being that the traitor
was hanged and the Sovereign saved.

Yet such was the condition of Europe at that day. A small, dull,
elderly, imperfectly-educated, patient, plodding invalid, with white hair
and protruding under jaw, and dreary visage, was sitting day after day;
seldom speaking, never smiling, seven or eight hours out of every twenty-
four, at a writing table covered with heaps of interminable despatches,
in a cabinet far away beyond the seas and mountains, in the very heart of
Spain. A clerk or two, noiselessly opening and shutting the door, from
time to time, fetching fresh bundles of letters and taking away others--
all written and composed by secretaries or high functionaries--and all
to be scrawled over in the margin by the diligent old man in a big
schoolboy's hand and style--if ever schoolboy, even in the sixteenth
century, could write so illegibly or express himself so awkwardly;
couriers in the court-yard arriving from or departing for the uttermost
parts of earth-Asia, Africa America, Europe-to fetch and carry these
interminable epistles which contained the irresponsible commands of this
one individual, and were freighted with the doom and destiny of countless
millions of the world's inhabitants--such was the system of government
against which the Netherlands had protested and revolted. It was a
system under which their fields had been made desolate, their cities
burned and pillaged, their men hanged, burned, drowned, or hacked to
pieces; their women subjected to every outrage; and to put an end to
which they had been devoting their treasure and their blood for nearly
the length of one generation. It was a system, too, which, among other
results, had just brought about the death of the foremost statesman of
Europe, and had nearly effected simultaneously the murder of the most