The arrival of Archduke Ernest at the seat of the provincial Government offered an opportunity, which had long been wanting, for a display of John Baptist’s genius.  The new viceroy was in so shattered a condition of health, so crippled with the gout, as to be quite unable to stand, and it required the services of several lackeys to lift him into and out of his carriage.  A few days of repose therefore were indispensable to him before he could make his “joyous entrance” into the capital.  But the day came at last, and the exhibition was a masterpiece.

It might have seemed that the abject condition of the Spanish provinces—­desolate, mendicant, despairing—­would render holiday making impossible.  But although almost every vestige of the ancient institutions had vanished from the obedient Netherlands as a reward for their obedience; although to civil and religious liberty, law, order, and a thriving commercial and manufacturing existence, such as had been rarely witnessed in the world, had succeeded the absolute tyranny of Jesuits, universal beggary, and a perennial military mutiny—­setting Government at defiance and plundering the people—­there was one faithful never deserted Belgica, and that was Rhetoric.

Neither the magnificence nor the pedantry of the spectacles by which the entry of the mild and inefficient Ernest into Brussels and Antwerp was now solemnized had ever been surpassed.  The town councils, stimulated by hopes absolutely without foundation as to great results to follow the advent of the emperor’s brother, had voted large sums and consumed many days in anxious deliberation upon the manner in which they should be expended so as most to redound to the honour of Ernest and the reputation of the country.

In place of the “bloody tragedies of burning, murdering, and ravishing,” of which the provinces had so long been the theatre, it was resolved that, “Rhetoric’s sweet comedies, amorous jests, and farces,” should gladden all eyes and hearts.  A stately procession of knights and burghers in historical and mythological costumes, followed by ships, dromedaries, elephants, whales, giants, dragons, and other wonders of the sea and shore, escorted the archduke into the city.  Every street and square was filled with triumphal arches, statues and platforms, on which the most ingenious and thoroughly classical living pictures were exhibited.  There was hardly an eminent deity of Olympus, or hero of ancient history, that was not revived and made visible to mortal eyes in the person of Ernestus of Austria.

On a framework fifty-five feet high and thirty-three feet in breadth he was represented as Apollo hurling his darts at an enormous Python, under one of whose fore-paws struggled an unfortunate burgher, while the other clutched a whole city; Tellus, meantime, with her tower on her head, kneeling anxious and imploring at the feet of her deliverer.  On another stage Ernest assumed the shape of Perseus; Belgica that of