to insult and to crush, the valiant but modest Roman erected his trophy upon the plains of Idistavisus.  “The army of Tiberius Caesar having subdued the nations between the Rhine and the Elbe, dedicate this monument to Mars, to Jupiter, and to Augustus.”  So ran the inscription of Germanicus, without a word of allusion to his own name.  The Duke of Alva, on his return from the battle-fields of Brabant and Friesland, reared a colossal statue of himself, and upon its pedestal caused these lines to be engraved:  “To Ferdinand Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, Governor of the Netherlands under Philip the Second, for having extinguished sedition, chastised rebellion, restored religion, secured justice, established peace; to the King’s most faithful minister this monument is erected.”

[Bor, iv. 257, 258.  Meteren, 61.  De Thou, v. 471-473, who saw it after it was overthrown, and who was “as much struck by the beauty of the work as by the insane pride of him who ordered it to be made.”]

So pompous a eulogy, even if truthful and merited, would be sufficiently inflated upon a tombstone raised to a dead chieftain by his bereaved admirers.  What shall we say of such false and fulsome tribute, not to a god, not to the memory of departed greatness, but to a living, mortal man, and offered not by his adorers but by himself?  Certainly, self-worship never went farther than in this remarkable monument, erected in Alva’s honor, by Alva’s hands.  The statue was colossal, and was placed in the citadel of Antwerp.  Its bronze was furnished by the cannon captured at Jemmingen.  It represented the Duke trampling upon a prostrate figure with two heads, four arms, and one body.  The two heads were interpreted by some to represent Egmont and Horn, by others, the two Nassaus, William and Louis.  Others saw in them an allegorical presentment of the nobles and commons of the Netherlands, or perhaps an impersonation of the Compromise and the Request.  Besides the chief inscription on the pedestal, were sculptured various bas-reliefs; and the spectator, whose admiration for the Governor-general was not satiated with the colossal statue itself, was at liberty to find a fresh, personification of the hero, either in a torch-bearing angel or a gentle shepherd.  The work, which had considerable esthetic merit, was executed by an artist named Jacob Jongeling.  It remained to astonish and disgust the Netherlanders until it was thrown down and demolished by Alva’s successor, Requesens.

It has already been observed that many princes of the Empire had, at first warmly and afterwards, as the storm darkened around him, with less earnestness, encouraged the efforts of Orange.  They had, both privately and officially, urged the subject upon the attention of the Emperor, and had solicited his intercession with Philip.  It was not an interposition to save the Prince from chastisement, however the artful pen of Granvelle might distort the facts.  It was an address in behalf of religious liberty for the Netherlands, made by those who had achieved it in their own persons, and who were at last enjoying immunity from persecution.  It was an appeal which they who made it were bound to make, for the Netherland commissioners had assisted at the consultations by which the Peace of Passau had been wrung from the reluctant hand of Charles.