His literary accomplishments were very great.  His fecundity was prodigious, and he wrote at will in seven languages.  ’This polyglot facility was not in itself a very remarkable circumstance, for it grew out of his necessary education and geographical position.  Few men in that age and region were limited to their mother tongue.  The Prince of Orange, who made no special pretence to learning, possessed at least five languages.  Egmont, who was accounted an ignorant man, was certainly familiar with three.  The Cardinal, however, wrote not only with ease, but with remarkable elegance, vigor and vivacity, in whatever language he chose to adopt.  The style of his letters and other documents, regarded simply as compositions, was inferior to that of no writer of the age.  His occasional orations, too, were esteemed models of smooth and flowing rhetoric, at an epoch when the art of eloquence was not much cultivated.  Yet it must be allowed that beneath all the shallow but harmonious flow of his periods, it would be idle to search for a grain of golden sand.  Not a single sterling, manly thought is to be found in all his productions.  If at times our admiration is excited with the appearance of a gem of true philosophy, we are soon obliged to acknowledge, on closer inspection, that we have been deceived by a false glitter.  In retirement, his solitude was not relieved by serious application to any branch of knowledge.  Devotion to science and to the advancement of learning, a virtue which has changed the infamy of even baser natures than his into glory, never dignified his seclusion.  He had elegant tastes, he built fine palaces, he collected paintings, and he discoursed of the fine arts with the skill and eloquence of a practised connoisseur; but the nectared fruits of divine philosophy were but harsh and crabbed to him.

His moral characteristics are even more difficult to seize than his intellectual traits.  It is a perplexing task to arrive at the intimate interior structure of a nature which hardly had an interior.  He did not change, but he presented himself daily in different aspects.  Certain peculiarities he possessed, however, which were unquestionable.  He was always courageous, generally calm.  Placed in the midst of a nation which hated him, exposed to the furious opposition of the most powerful adversaries, having hardly a friend, except the cowardly Viglius and the pluralist Morillon, secretly betrayed by Margaret of Parma, insulted by rude grandees, and threatened by midnight assassins, he never lost his self-possession, his smooth arrogance, his fortitude.  He was constitutionally brave.  He was not passionate in his resentments.  To say that he was forgiving by nature would be an immense error; but that he could put aside vengeance at the dictate of policy is very certain.  He could temporize, even after the reception of what he esteemed grave injuries, if the offenders were powerful.  He never manifested rancor against the Duchess.