The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1855-11-20 00:00:00

SUPPLEMENT TO
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AND GENERAL COMMERCIAL ADVERTIS

of the Reign of Philip the Second" here pub-
lished, contains a retrospect of the events which
preceded his elevation to the throne, and carries
the reader forward to that portion of the struggles
against religious persecution in the Netherlands,
which ends with the execution of Egmont and
Hoorne, and of the Baron de Montigny. It re-
lates the domestic life of Philip, his matrimonial
alliances, and his personal history. Among the
events enumerated under the second head of the
above division, are included his visit to England,
and espousals with our own Queen Mary of Eng-
land, who, miserable woman, was known to our
fathers, as she is to ourselves, and will be to our
children, as " Bloody Mary."

The panorama of events, the extensive array of
character and incidents, and the vast theatre on
which the different acts of the great historic
drama were enacted, environ the narrative with
numerous difficulties which, taken up by a man
of inferior, or even mediocre mind, would have
been encumbered by difficulties and obscured by
the multiplicity of perplexing details. In the
hands of Mr. Prescott these have scarcely been
felt as inconveniences. Foreseeing the obstacles
by which his path must be beset, he in a great
degree obviates them by adopting a system of
historic grouping, in which the various cycles of
events move round a common centre, and are
animated by, or are easily referable to, a common
principle. By the adoption of this method,
which he has ably carried out, Mr. Prescott has
been successful in clearly tracing the course of
events at once momentous in their consequences
and complicated in their evolution.
The grand historic drama is opened by a skil-
fully-set scene, in which the imagination of the
reader is filled and his attention secured, while it
impresses upon his mind an episode which lent a
large proportion of the many hues by which the
stupendous picture is afterwards tinted, and from
which it borrowed many of its brightest lights,
and not a few of its deepest and most sombre
shadows. That scene is laid in the great hall of
the royal palace at Brussels, the time, the 25th
of October, 1555. The chief actor, Charlesl V.,
in outward and in mental mourning for the loss
of his mother, stripped of every courtly ornament,
except the collar of the toison d'or (the golden
fleece) which hung from his neck, leaning on the
shoulder of the young William of Orange, is in the
act of bidding farewell to his subjects, and formally
abdicating his dominion in favour of his son
Philip the Second.

From this impressive tableatithe reader is car-
ried, by a well managed retrospect, through the
early career of Philip. In this the young Spaniard
is exhibited growing up in pride and self-posses-
sion ; serious and thoughtful beyond his years.
As a mere boy, he has been called on to take part
in councils of state, and has been carefully
initiated into the mysteries by which kingdoms
are managed ; little more than a boy, he has been
admonished by his father of the precise amount
of counsel he could receive from each of the indi-
viduals by whom he is surrounded, and taught
"to depend on no one' but himself." Such train-
ing and admonitory lessons were peculiarly neces-
sary to one destined to wield the sceptre over so
vast and complicated a territory as he was early