generations.  The splendid Hotel de Ville, with its daring spire and elaborate front, ornamented one side of the place; directly opposite was the graceful but incoherent facade of the Brood-huis, now the last earthly resting place of the two distinguished victims; while grouped around these principal buildings rose the fantastic palaces of the Archers, Mariners, and other guilds, with their festooned walls and toppling gables bedizened profusely with emblems, statues, and quaint decorations.  The place had been alike the scene of many a brilliant tournament and of many a bloody execution.  Gallant knights had contended within its precincts, while bright eyes rained influences from all those picturesque balconies and decorated windows.  Martyrs to religious and to political liberty had upon the same spot endured agonies which might have roused every stone of its pavement to mutiny or softened them to pity.  Here Egmont himself, in happier days, had often borne away the prize of skill or of valor, the cynosure of every eye; and hence, almost in the noon of a life illustrated by many brilliant actions, he was to be sent, by the hand of tyranny, to his great account.’

There are, too, dashes of a healthy sarcasm among these records, not, however, of such frequent occurrence as to darken the flow of the narrative, but sufficiently indicative of the strength and energy of the writer.  Never attacking the honest faith of any man, his satires are levelled at hypocrisy, never error, as when he says of the venerable tyrant, the master of the Invincible Armada, when he had received from the trembling secretary the assurance of the failure of the hope of Spain:  ’So the king, as fortune flew away from him, wrapped himself in his virtue, and his counsellors, imitating their sovereign, arrayed themselves in the same garment;’ a scanty mantle, in truth, but, no doubt, amply sufficient for the denizens of that torrid atmosphere of bigotry in which Spain has lived for centuries.

Of what earnest stuff Motley’s dreams of religious freedom are made, we read in his terse comments upon the declaration of the principles of liberty of conscience by the States General.  ’Such words shine through the prevailing darkness of the religious atmosphere at that epoch like characters of light.  They are beacons in the upward path of mankind.  Never before had so bold and wise a tribute to the genius of the Reformation been paid by an organized community.  Individuals walking in advance of their age had enunciated such truths, and their voices had seemed to die away, but at last, a little, struggling, half-developed commonwealth had proclaimed the rights of conscience for all mankind.’