for great subjects are ever in order. So profoundly helpful, so inspiring was his preaching, that I, for one, lived on it, from fortnight to fortnight, and went to it every time with the expectation and the experience of receiving the bread of heaven on which I was to live and grow, until the manna fell again; and men of all ages had much the same feeling. When, for the first time, I saw Channing out of the pulpit, I was as much surprised at his diminutive form as if, expecting a giant, I had met a dwarf! He had seemed to me a large and tall man in his pulpit; but I soon found that, slight and low as his frame was, nearness and familiarity took nothing from its dignity, and suggested nothing fragile or weak. Indeed his attenuated and lowly figure really increased the sense of his moral majesty and intellectual eminence. His presence was more awful, simple and gentle as he was, than that of any human being I ever saw. Francis Alexander Durivage. BORN in Boston, Mass., 1814. DIED in New York, N. Y., 1881. CHEZ BRÉBANT. THE vicomte is wearing a brow of gloom As he mounts the stair to his favorite room. "Then the pretty young lady is coming to-day!" I want no clients from Père la Chaise. Silver and crystal-a splendid show! His vis-à-vis is an empty chair. But he calls to the garçon, "Antoine! Vite! Place a stool for the lady's feet." "The lady, monsieur?" (in & wavering tone). "Yes-when have you known me to breakfast alone? Fill up her glass! Versez! Versez ! You see how white are her cheeks to-day: Sip it, my darling, 'twas ordered for thee." He raises his glass, "d toi, Mimi!" The garçon shudders, for nothing is there When the garçon was gone he sprang up with a start: Could I think, when she gave it with generous joy, A woman's heart such a fragile toy? Her trim little figure no longer I see! The landlord enters, and lying there Is the dead vicomte, with a stony glare Rigidly fixed on an empty chair. BORN in Dorchester, Mass., 1814. DIED at "Kingston-Russell House," Dorsetshire, England, 1877. HIS PROJECT FOR A GREAT HISTORY. [Letter to F. H. Underwood, 4 March, 1859.—John Lothrop Motley. A Memoir. By Oliver Wendell Holmes. 1879.] THE HE whole work, of which the three volumes already published form a part, will be called "The Eighty Years' War for Liberty." Epoch I. is the Rise of the Dutch Republic. Epoch II. Independence Achieved. From the Death of William the Silent till the Twelve Years' Truce. 1584-1609. Epoch III. Independence Recognized. From the Twelve Years' Truce to the Peace of Westphalia. 1609-1648. My subject is a very vast one, for the struggle of the United Provinces with Spain was one in which all the leading states of Europe were more or less involved. After the death of William the Silent, the history assumes world-wide proportions. Thus the volume which I am just about terminating . . is almost as much English history as Dutch. The Earl of Leicester, very soon after the death of Orange, was appointed governor of the provinces, and the alliance between the two countries almost amounted to a political union. I shall try to get the whole of the Leicester administration, terminating with the grand drama of the Invincible Armada, into one volume; but I doubt, my materials are so enor mous. I have been personally very hard at work, nearly two years, ransacking the British State-Paper Office, the British Museum, and the Holland archives, and I have had two copyists constantly engaged in London, and two others at the Hague. Besides this, I passed the whole of last winter at Brussels, where, by special favor of the Belgian Government, I was allowed to read what no one else has ever been permitted to see, the great mass of copies taken by that government from the Simancas archives, a translated epitome of which has been published by Gachard. This correspondence reaches to the death of Philip II., and is of immense extent and importance. Had I not obtained leave to read the invaluable and, for my purpose, indispensable documents at Brussels, I should have gone to Spain, for they will not be published these twenty years, and then only in a translated and excessively abbreviated and unsatisfactory form. I have read the whole of this correspondence, and made very copious notes of it. In truth, I devoted three months of last winter to that purpose alone. The materials I have collected from the English archives are also extremely important and curious. I have hundreds of interesting letters never published or to be published, by Queen Elizabeth, Burghley, Walsingham, Sidney, Drake, Willoughby, Leicester, and others. For the whole of that portion of my subject in which Holland and England were combined into one whole, to resist Spain in its attempt to obtain the universal empire, I have very abundant collections. For the history of the United Provinces is not at all a provincial history. It is the history of European liberty. Without the struggle of Holland and England against Spain, all Europe might have been Catholic and Spanish. It was Holland that saved England in the sixteenth century, and, by so doing, secured the triumph of the Reformation, and placed the independence of the various states of Europe upon a sure foundation. Of course, the materials collected by me at the Hague are of great importance. As a single specimen, I will state that I found in the archives there an immense and confused mass of papers, which turned out to be the autograph letters of Olden Barneveld during the last few years of his life; during, in short, the whole of that most important period which preceded his execution. These letters are in such an intolerable handwriting that no one has ever attempted to read them. I could read them only imperfectly myself, and it would have taken me a very long time to have acquired the power to do so; but my copyist and reader there is the most patient and indefatigable person alive, and he has quite mastered the handwriting, and he writes me that they are a mine of historical wealth for me. I shall have complete copies before I get to that period, one of signal interest, and which has never been described. I mention these matters that you may see that my work, whatever its other value may be, is built upon the only foundation fit for history-original contemporary documents. These are all unpublished. Of course, I use the contemporary historians and pamphleteers-Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English-but the most valuable of my sources are manuscript ones. I have said the little which I have said in order to vindicate the largeness of the subject. The kingdom of Holland is a small power now, but the Eighty Years' War, which secured the civil and religious independence of the Dutch Commonwealth and of Europe, was the great event of that whole age. The whole work will therefore cover a most remarkable epoch in human history, from the abdication of Charles Fifth to the Peace of Westphalia, at which last point the political and geographical arrangements of Europe were established on a permanent basis,-in the main undisturbed until the French Revolution. CH PORTRAITS OF CHARLES AND PHILIP. [The Rise of the Dutch Republic. A History. 1855.] HARLES the Fifth was then fifty-five years and eight months old; but he was already decrepit with premature old age. He was of about the middle height, and had been athletic and well-proportioned. Broad in the shoulders, deep in the chest, thin in the flank, very muscular in the arms and legs, he had been able to match himself with all competitors in the tourney and the ring, and to vanquish the bull with his own hand in the favorite national amusement of Spain. He had been able in the field to do the duty of captain and soldier, to endure fatigue and exposure, and every privation except fasting. These personal advantages were now departed. Crippled in hands, knees, and legs, he supported himself with difficulty upon a crutch, with the aid of an attendant's shoulder. In face he had always been extremely ugly, and time had certainly not improved his physiognomy. His hair, once of a light color, was now white with age, close-clipped and bristling; his beard was gray, coarse, and shaggy. His forehead was spacious and commanding; the eye was dark-blue, with an expression both majestic and benignant. His nose was aquiline but crooked. The lower part of his face was famous for its deformity. The under lip, a Burgundian inheritance, as faithfully transmitted as the duchy and county, was heavy and hanging; the lower jaw protruding so far beyond the upper that it was impossible for him to bring together the few fragments of teeth which still remained, or to speak a whole sentence in an intelligible voice. Eating and talking, occupations to which he was always much addicted, were becoming daily more arduous, in consequence of this original defect, which now seemed hardly human, but rather an original deformity. So much for the father. The son, Philip the Second, was a small, meagre man, much below the middle height, with thin legs, and narrow chest, and the shrinking, timid air of an habitual invalid. He seemed so little, upon his first visit to his aunts, the Queens Eleanor and Mary, accustomed to look upon proper men in Flanders and Germany, that he was fain to win their favor by making certain attempts in the tournament, in which his success was sufficiently problematical. "His body," says his professed panegyrist, "was but a human cage, in which, however brief and narrow, dwelt a soul to whose flight the immeasurable expanse of heaven was too contracted." The same wholesale admirer adds, that "his aspect was so reverend, that rustics who met him alone in a wood, without knowing him, bowed down with instinctive veneration." In face, he was the living image of his father, having the same broad forehead and blue eye, with the same aquiline, but better proportioned, nose. In the lower part of the countenance, the remarkable Burgundian deformity was likewise reproduced. He had the same heavy, hanging lip, with a vast mouth, and monstrously protruding lower jaw. His complexion was fair, his hair light and thin, his beard yellow, short, and pointed. He had the aspect of a Fleming, but the loftiness of a Spaniard. His demeanor in public was still, silent, almost sepulchral. He looked habitually on the ground when he conversed, was chary of speech, embarrassed, and even suffering in manner. This was ascribed partly to a natural haughtiness which he had occasionally endeavored to overcome, and partly to habitual pains in the stomach, occasioned by his inordinate fondness for pastry. Such was the personal appearance of the man who was about to receive into his single hand the destinies of half the world; whose single will was, for the future, to shape the fortunes of every individual then present, of many millions more in Europe, America, and at the ends of the earth, and of countless millions yet unborn. ΜΕ THE FALL OF ANTWERP. [From the Same.] EANTIME the Spanish cavalry had cleft its way through the city. On the side farthest removed from the castle, along the Horsemarket, opposite the New-town, the states dragoons and the light horse of Beveren had been posted, and the flying masses of pursuers and pursued swept at last through this outer circle. Champagny was already |