Their national industry was untiring; their prosperity unexampled; their love of liberty indomitable; their pugnacity proverbial.  Peaceful in their pursuits, phlegmatic by temperament, the Netherlands were yet the most belligerent and excitable population of Europe.  Two centuries of civil war had but thinned the ranks of each generation without quenching the hot spirit of the nation.

The women were distinguished by beauty of form and vigor of constitution.  Accustomed from childhood to converse freely with all classes and sexes in the daily walks of life, and to travel on foot or horseback from one town to another, without escort and without fear, they had acquired manners more frank and independent than those of women in other lands, while their morals were pure and their decorum undoubted.  The prominent part to be sustained by the women of Holland in many dramas of the revolution would thus fitly devolve upon a class, enabled by nature and education to conduct themselves with courage.

Within the little circle which encloses the seventeen provinces are 208 walled cities, many of them among the most stately in Christendom, 150 chartered towns, 6,300 villages, with their watch-towers and steeples, besides numerous other more insignificant hamlets; the whole guarded by a belt of sixty fortresses of surpassing strength.

XIV.

Thus in this rapid sketch of the course and development of the Netherland nation during sixteen centuries, we have seen it ever marked by one prevailing characteristic, one master passion—­the love of liberty, the instinct of self-government.  Largely compounded of the bravest Teutonic elements, Batavian and Frisian, the race ever battles to the death with tyranny, organizes extensive revolts in the age of Vespasian, maintains a partial independence even against the sagacious dominion of Charlemagne, refuses in Friesland to accept the papal yoke or feudal chain, and, throughout the dark ages, struggles resolutely towards the light, wresting from a series of petty sovereigns a gradual and practical recognition of the claims of humanity.  With the advent of the Burgundian family, the power of the commons has reached so high a point, that it is able to measure itself, undaunted, with the spirit of arbitrary rule, of which that engrossing and tyrannical house is the embodiment.  For more than a century the struggle for freedom, for civic life, goes on; Philip the Good, Charles the Bold, Mary’s husband Maximilian, Charles V., in turn, assailing or undermining the bulwarks raised, age after age, against the despotic principle.  The combat is ever renewed.  Liberty, often crushed, rises again and again from her native earth with redoubled energy.  At last, in the 16th century, a new and more powerful spirit, the genius of religious freedom, comes to participate in the great conflict.  Arbitrary power, incarnated in the second Charlemagne, assails the new combination