the bound and despairing Andromeda.  On a third, the interior of Etna was revealed, when Vulcan was seen urging his Cyclops to forge for Ernest their most tremendous thunderbolts with which to smite the foes of the provinces, those enemies being of course the English and the Hollanders.  Venus, the while, timidly presented an arrow to her husband, which he was requested to sharpen, in order that when the wars were over Cupid, therewith might pierce the heart of some beautiful virgin, whose charms should reward Ernest—­fortunately for the female world, still a bachelor—­for his victories and his toils.

The walls of every house were hung with classic emblems and inscribed with Latin verses.  All the pedagogues of Brussels and Antwerp had been at work for months, determined to amaze the world with their dithyrambics and acrostics, and they had outdone themselves.

Moreover, in addition to all these theatrical spectacles and pompous processions—­accompanied as they were by blazing tar-barrels, flying dragons, and leagues of flaring torches—­John Baptist, who had been director-in-chief of all the shows successively arranged to welcome Don John of Austria, Archduke Matthias, Francis of Alengon, and even William of Orange, into the capital, had prepared a feast of a specially intellectual character for the new governor-general.

The pedant, according to his own account, so soon as the approach of Ernest had been announced, fell straightway into a trance.  While he was in that condition, a beautiful female apparition floated before his eyes, and, on being questioned, announced her name to be Moralization.  John Baptist begged her to inform him whether it were true, as had been stated, that Jupiter had just sent Mercury to the Netherlands.  The phantom, correcting his mistake, observed that the king of gods and men had not sent Hermes but the Archduke Ernestus, beloved of the three Graces, favourite of the nine Muses, and, in addition to these advantages, nephew and brother-in-law of the King of Spain, to the relief of the suffering provinces.  The Netherlands, it was true, for their religious infidelity, had justly incurred great disasters and misery; but benignant Jove, who, to the imagination of this excited Fleming, seemed to have been converted to Catholicism while still governing the universe, had now sent them in mercy a deliverer.  The archduke would speedily relieve “bleeding Belgica” from her sufferings, bind up her wounds, and annihilate her enemies.  The spirit further informed the poet that the forests of the Low Countries—­so long infested by brigands, wood-beggars, and malefactors of all kinds—­would thenceforth swarm with “nymphs, rabbits, hares, and animals of that nature.”