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A SNOW STORM IN GHENT.

roofs of the lofty buildings, the winding streets, and the canals which intersected the town. The stone tracery of the ancient churches, the indented gables of the palaces and sombre convents, the branches of the leafless trees along the quays, and the rigging of the motionless ships which lay like captives chained amidst the frozen waters, were alike marked in silvery outline upon the deepening gloom of twilight.

In that splendid city, where, not two years before, the voice of commerce had echoed from quarter to quarter, and busy throngs from every land hurried to and fro, wealthy, animated, and industrious, all now was silent and mournful; the breath of its life had departed, and, like a corpse within its shroud, Ghent lay that night mute, cold, and motionless. The sword of persecution had made desolate its walls.

The wrath of Philip the Second of Spain, against his protestant subjects in the Netherlands, was at that time raging in its greatest fury; many of the most industrious citizens had

PERSECUTION.

3

fled from his tyranny, and that of his iron-hearted minister the Duke of Alba, to seek shelter in other lands, or, deceived by their subtle promises, had fallen victims to the merciless Inquisition and the Council of Blood. The Counts Egmont and Horn had perished on a scaffold at Brussels, for asserting the rights of their countrymen, and Count Montigny, for the same cause, had been mercilessly sacrificed in Spain; the blood of every rank, of the innocent, the helpless, the aged, and the young, alike flowed daily beneath the axe of the executioner; the canals were choked with dead, the ravagers gorged with plunder, yet still under the name of religion the bigots persevered in this reckless destruction of their fellow creatures; and, under the plea of exciting what he called a salutary terror in his rebellious subjects, Philip went on annihilating not only the freedom which his soul detested, but, with it, the wealth and prosperity of his dominions.

Few men can bear the test of

power, and

neither Alba nor his master were of the number; maddened by its possession, and their hearts indurated by fanaticism, they set up their own opinions as the measure of faith by which the people could alone hope to be saved in this world or the next, and swept all to an untimely grave who denied the justice of the standard. The Prince of Orange, after long vainly endeavouring to arrest the progress of the Spaniard by pacific measures, had marched from Nassau in the summer of 1568, with a considerable army, and crossed the Meuse in defiance of the superior force of the Duke of Alba; but his masterly campaign had won no signal success, and he was at length compelled to disband his troops without having avenged the murder of his friends, arrested the progress of persecution, or alleviated the misfortunes of his bleeding country.

As might well be expected by all acquainted with the character of his opponents, the failure of this enterprize only redoubled their inquisitorial cruelty, and deepened the hopeless gloom

UNIVERSAL DESOLATION.

5

which every day gathered darker and darker above that ill-fated land. At Ghent the inquisition had been re-established in its utmost rigour; all to whom the slightest charge of protestantism could be attached were daily buried in its dungeons, or suffered an ignominious death, till most of those whose wealth offered a temptation to calumny and spoliation, had fled from their homes in search of a more secure asylum, and terror, mistrust, and gloom pervaded the remainder of the inhabitants, when winter deprived them of all hopes of assistance from the foreign abettors of their cause.

Strangers no longer visited the city as usual, in pursuit of pleasure or of gain; the shops were forsaken, and many of the fairest, as well as meanest buildings were untenanted; the citizens remained as much as possible cautiously shut up in their houses, and when the cold keen winter wind howled that evening through the desolate streets, not a foot print could be seen upon the newly fallen snow, except the track of a solitary

man who, before the last glimmer of declining day had totally disappeared, advanced with rapid steps towards the street of the Dominicans, until he reached the middle of the bridge leading to it, across the canal, whose dark waters wash the foundations of the splendid church of St. Michael, and the dreary walls of the adjoining

convent.

As if struck by the sombre beauty of the scene, half shrouded in the twilight, where irregular buildings of every form and architecture arose abruptly from the sullen waves, discoloured by the stains of ages and the moisture of the climate, and pinnacled roofs and the lofty masts of the shipping were dimly visible amidst the the mist which closed the narrow vista, the stranger paused upon the old stone bridge, and, wrapping his ample cloak yet closer around him, gazed on every side with the hurried and earnest glance of one who strove to recal, by the survey, the remembrance of the past. But a keen eye might likewise have observed that there was