efforts to fix for ever an impregnable military tyranny upon a constitutional country, might cause a more modest despot to exult.  It was not wonderful that the haughty, and now apparently omnipotent Alva, should almost assume the god.  On his return to Brussels he instituted a succession of triumphant festivals.  The people were called upon to rejoice and to be exceeding glad, to strew flowers in his path, to sing Hosannas in his praise who came to them covered with the blood of those who had striven in their defence.  The holiday was duly called forth; houses, where funeral hatchments for murdered inmates had been perpetually suspended, were decked with garlands; the bells, which had hardly once omitted their daily knell for the victims of an incredible cruelty, now rang their merriest peals; and in the very square where so lately Egmont and Horn, besides many other less distinguished martyrs, had suffered an ignominious death, a gay tournament was held, day after day, with all the insolent pomp which could make the exhibition most galling.

But even these demonstrations of hilarity were not sufficient.  The conqueror and tamer of the Netherlands felt that a more personal and palpable deification was necessary for his pride.  When Germanicus had achieved his last triumph over the ancient freedom of those generous races whose descendants, but lately in possession of a better organized liberty, Alva had been sent by the second and the worse Tiberius 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