a considerable share of freedom; commerce and manufactures flourished, and as the natural consequence of such a state of affairs, more enlightened opinions on questions both civil and religious, arose and were disseminated among the thinking portion of the community.

Unfortunately, neither the temper nor the education of the Spanish monarch inclined him to study the felicity of those he governed. According to his harsh and narrow views, it was impossible for loyalty to the prince or devotion to God, to exist apart from the most abject prostration of mind and will. Hence, from the very commencement of his reign, the standard of despotism was unfurled over his extensive dominions, and to the close of his gloomy and distempered life, the whole force of a cunning and unrelenting spirit was directed towards the suppression of whatever is best calculated to add to the moral dignity of man.

The doctrines of the Reformation, under various modifications, had spread through the Low Countries. To exterminate what he believed to be the darkest heresies, and to subvert the barriers of popular independence, formed the constant aim of Philip's sinister and cruel policy. By the subtle agency of his minister Granvelle, Bishop of Arras, he made formidable innovations on the Belgian institutions, both secular and ecclesiastical. The council of the Netherlands, in the person of their representative, the celebrated Count Egmont, remonstrated at Madrid. Philip cajoled the Count with flattering attentions and specious promises, but made him the bearer

of written orders for the establishment of a secret tribunal for the destruction of heretics—a tribunal differing from the Inquisition only by the omission of the

name.

The

For a time the government of the Low Countries hesitated to obey commands, utterly hostile to the acknowledged rights of the people under its control. In the beginning of the year 1566, however, these black instructions were put into sanguinary operation. Every where did the diabolical zeal of persecution scatter dismay, confusion, and death. A fierce spirit of resistance was roused by these iniquities. patriotic Belgian nobles withdrew from the councils. of their deputed ruler, the Duchess of Parma; the celebrated confederacy of the Gueux was formed; the number of converts to the reformed faith was increased, and with their augmented strength, arose also a furious vindictiveness against whatever wore the impress of the antagonist creed. The annals of Artois and West Flanders, bear testimony to the remarkable occurrences of the year 1566, especially to the ravages of the Imagebreakers, who waged an unsparing war against those embellishments of art, with which the munificence of Roman Catholic devotion had adorned the edifices appropriated to its exercise.

It was in the commencement of this eventful year, that a pedestrian way-farer, who had diverged, from the high road in the hope of shortening his path, found himself entangled at night-fall, in a wood of considerable extent, about two leagues north-east of St. Omer.

He had been travelling all day with little intermission, and although long-winded, muscular, and active, was nearly spent with fatigue. The sense of bodily exhaustion had been rendered doubly oppressive, by the difficulty of threading a beaten, but narrow track, so much overshadowed by the luxuriant growth of grasses and underwood, that ere the light of evening had entirely declined, no trace of human footprint was discernible. Impatient to reach the suburbs of St. Omer before midnight, he toiled onward in what he conceived to be the right direction, until after ascending for some time a gentle acclivity, he found himself, benighted and hemmed in, not only by pitchy darkness, but by the long and intertwisted arms of forest trees. At every step he stumbled over bare and knotted roots, or was impeded by the clinging of matted briars to the capacious Spanish mantle which shrouded his tall person. Subdued by necessity, he at last gave up the struggle, and determined to halt and rest his wearied limbs, until the approaching moonlight should enable him to retrace his course to the highway, he had so unwarily quitted. Seating himself at the foot of a large tree, and leaning back against its massive stem, he gathered his cloak tightly around him, to protect him from the chill night air. His eyes soon grew heavy, and although he endeavoured to maintain his wakefulness, by summoning up the memory of past sufferings, or by indulging lively anticipations of future, and not distant, triumphs over the enemies of his faith, sleep gradually stole upon him and wrapt him in refreshing slumber.

But brief was the interval of repose to his fiery and ill-regulated imagination. Though the sleep of the body was deep and long, the restless spirit was haunted by a flitting train of ominous shapes and deadly perils, which, from confused and vapoury phantasms, settled into things connected and defined. The strange machinery of his vision was presented to him, with all the impressive fidelity of the stirring agencies of life.

He dreamed he was at Antwerp, in a capacious hall hung round with black, and dimly lighted by a solitary lamp. He was arraigned on a charge of heresy, before a tribunal of Inquisitors, whose close-drawn cowls concealed every feature except their eyes, which seemed to glare upon him like burning coals. For a time the stillness of the grave prevailed in that gloomy hall, and the accused and his judges-those fearful men with the eyes of basilisks-gazed steadfastly on each other. Suddenly the ponderous bell of the cathedral tolled one. Then arose the chief Inquisitor, and with extended arm, and in tones stern and hollow, doomed the apostate Baldwin to eternal torture. A shadow fell upon the dreamer's soul, and shut it out from the visible world, in which there was for him no hope. In his sore extremity, he lifted up his voice to the Most High, and supplicated for the strength of Sampson, that he might go forth upon a mission of judgment. And his petition was heard, for with a mighty effort he burst his iron bands, and with marvellous impunity cleared the gates of his prison, in despite of monks, troopers, bullet and steel. Rushing with lightning speed along the streets,

he darted through the open door of the cathedral, and took refuge in the organ-loft. He had scarcely gained it, when floated from below the murmur of many voices, as if in prayer. A moment before he had crossed the church floor in his flight, and it was silent and lonely; yet now, looking down from his elevated hiding-place, he beheld, to his amazement, a countless multitude thronging the nave and aisles. His ear was arrested by a speaker's solemn and powerful tones, and turning to the pulpit, he recoiled with terror when he saw it filled by a man of wild aspect, whose garb was that of a Reformed preacher, and whose features were the exact counterpart of his own. With indignant and resistless eloquence, the sacred orator inveighed against the practice of image-worship, which he denounced as a remnant of Paganism, and a mockery of God. Like an apostolic son of thunder," he called upon his hearers to arise in their strength to hurl down and utterly destroy the accursed idols that polluted the temple of Jehovah. Anon a roar, like the rush of mountain floods, burst from the great company, and instantly the images that crowded each niche and altar of the goodly pile, were dashed from their pedestals and trodden under foot, and heaped up as wood for a sacrifice, until the accumulated mass appeared to touch the roof of the cathedral. Then knelt the preacher and prayed, and the clouds were rent asunder, and fire from Heaven descended on the pile of images, which blazed fiercely, and cleaving the dome, shot upward in a pyramid of flame. Then did the dream assume another form. The blazing pile had disappeared, and all was

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