was to move upon protocols and apostilles.  Events had no right to be born throughout his dominions, without a preparatory course of his obstetrical pedantry.  He could never learn that the earth would not rest on its axis, while he wrote a programme of the way it was to turn.  He was slow in deciding, slower in communicating his decisions.  He was prolix with his pen, not from affluence, but from paucity of ideas.  He took refuge in a cloud of words, sometimes to conceal his meaning, oftener to conceal the absence of any meaning, thus mystifying not only others but himself.  To one great purpose, formed early, he adhered inflexibly.  This, however, was rather an instinct than an opinion; born with him, not created by him.  The idea seemed to express itself through him, and to master him, rather than to form one of a stock of sentiments which a free agent might be expected to possess.  Although at certain times, even this master-feeling could yield to the pressure of a predominant self-interest-thus showing that even in Philip bigotry was not absolute—­yet he appeared on the whole the embodiment of Spanish chivalry and Spanish religious enthusiasm, in its late and corrupted form.  He was entirely a Spaniard.  The Burgundian and Austrian elements of his blood seemed to have evaporated, and his veins were filled alone with the ancient ardor, which in heroic centuries had animated the Gothic champions of Spain.  The fierce enthusiasm for the Cross, which in the long internal warfare against the Crescent, had been the romantic and distinguishing feature of the national character, had degenerated into bigotry.  That which had been a nation’s glory now made the monarch’s shame.  The Christian heretic was to be regarded with a more intense hatred than even Moor or Jew had excited in the most Christian ages, and Philip was to be the latest and most perfect incarnation of all this traditional enthusiasm, this perpetual hate.  Thus he was likely to be single-hearted in his life.  It was believed that his ambition would be less to extend his dominions than to vindicate his title of the most Catholic king.  There could be little doubt entertained that he would be, at least, dutiful to his father in this respect, and that the edicts would be enforced to the letter.

He was by birth, education, and character, a Spaniard, and that so exclusively, that the circumstance would alone have made him unfit to govern a country so totally different in habits and national sentiments from his native land.  He was more a foreigner in Brussels, even, than in England.  The gay, babbling, energetic, noisy life of Flanders and Brabant was detestable to him.  The loquacity of the Netherlanders was a continual reproach upon his taciturnity.  His education had imbued him, too, with the antiquated international hatred of Spaniard and Fleming, which had been strengthening in the metropolis, while the more rapid current of life had rather tended to obliterate the sentiment in the provinces.