friends of liberty thereupon sent for its subscribers and its author, and compelled the subscribers to cancel their signatures, and the author to tear up his own handiwork.

'Leader of a forlorn hope, Coornhert was filled with much of the aggressive spirit which belongs to the position. He displayed no less enthusiasm in favour of moderation and common sense than many of his antagonists brought to the support of the now forgotten dogmas which they desired to fasten upon the consciences of mankind.

'He was living in Tergou in 1589 when the Synod of South Holland met in that town. The inveterate controversialist immediately offered battle to the reverend body in a letter which the divines returned, desiring him to address the Estates. He was busy on a translation of Erasmus's Paraphrase of the New Testament, and had nearly completed it, when he was seized with the illness of which he died at Gouda on the 29th October 1590.

'Coornhert was a man of many and various accomplishments, who took a singularly far and clear-sighted view of the requirements of the world, and of the tendencies of human thought. A scholar, a poet, a philosopher, and a politician, he appears to have sustained the life in which he played those various parts by the modest gains of the graver which has brought his name within the scope of these pages. Forty years after his death a friendly hand was found to collect his multifarious writings into three folios, and to write his life. From this biography we learn that he was one of the most amply reviled men of his day. Erasmus himself hardly fared worse at the hands of theologians of all camps and colours. Judas, Theudas, uncircumcised Goliah, new Machiavel, semi-pagan, semi-idiot, are only a few of the names with which he was honoured.

'After the dust had for several ages rested on him and his works, his little treatise on "Good Breeding " has been again given to the world, with a new and appreciative notice of his life, in which he is called "the first of popular moralists, perhaps the only true and logical Pro"testant of his time, the vigilant soldier of the freedom of the Netherlands, and the most genial, the oldest, and the most powerful, of the "reformers of the Dutch tongue.'

As we propose to follow our author in this excursion wherever it is his pleasure to lead us, the next subject which invites our notice is that of the devices and arms of Charles V., here imperially exemplified. The two-headed, and even threeheaded eagle, of the united Houses of Austria and Burgundy is conspicuous on every page, and Sir William reminds us that this voracious bird suggested one of the few recorded pleasantries of Charles. Luigi Alamanni, a Florentine poet, whose Muse had not always paid court to Cæsar, for his patron was Francis I., had been sent by that King in 1544 to negotiate the peace of Crespy. Each sentence of the wearisome harangue it was his business to recite to the Emperor began with, The Eagle.' 'The Eagle' was become the king not of birds, but of men,

6

and so on.

Charles took advantage of a break to interpose

two lines from one of Alamanni's own poems,

'L'Aquila grifagna,

Che per più devorar due becchi porta.'

Nothing abashed, the poet-orator continued his harangue. 'In other days,' said he with infinite address, I wrote as a poet 'to whom fiction was permitted, and I now speak as an am'bassador in the sober language of truth.' The Emperor was so pleased with his readiness and spirit that, on rising to go to dinner, he placed his hand on his shoulder, and paid him compliment.

The personal devices of Charles are still more interesting than his eagle :

'His usual and favourite Device was one of the most famous inventions of its class when such inventions were held in high esteem, in the age when "the noble gentlemen of Europe, in adorning their glorious triumphs, declared their inward pretensions, purposes, and enter"prises, not by speech or any apparent manner, but shadowed under a "certain veil of forms or figures," and when it was the fashion for men of all degrees to clothe in symbolic shape their sympathies or antipathies, their sorrows, joys, or affections, or the hopes and ambitions of their lives. It consisted of a pair of columns, usually surmounted, the dexter with the double or mitred imperial crown, the sinister with a closed royal crown, with the motto Plus ultra, or sometimes Plus oultre, Noch weiter, Più oltre, Mas allá, according to the language of the country in which it was employed. The columns, or, to use the scientific dialect of Alciato and his fellow emblematists, the body of the device, represented the Pillars of Hercules, the twin rocks of Calpe and Abyla rent asunder by the hero, which stand sentinel at the western gate of the Mediterranean; the motto, or soul, pointed to the new world beyond the Atlantic, over which the House of Austria, in right of the crown of Castile, claimed universal sway.

'The invention of this device is ascribed by Paolo Giovio to Luigi Marliano, a Milanese, who, after having been for some time physician to the young king of Castile, took orders, and was promoted to the bishoprics first of Ciudad Rodrigo, and afterwards of Tuy. In bestowing upon Marliano his second mitre, Charles V. is recorded to have held out hopes of still further advancement by saying, 'I wil give more than this for the sake of the excellent Plus ultra you gave "me." The ingenious prelate seems to have attended to his own interests more than his episcopal duties, for although he was bishop of Tuy from 1518 to his death in 1521, he never set foot in the diocese. Over and above his other virtues, says Giovio, Marliano "was a great "mathematician, and devices of this kind, lively, illustrious, and neat, come not from the shop of gloved cats, but from most acute masters."

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Giovio's words (Dialogo, p. 22) are

Queste simili imprese

'suegliate illustre e nette, non escono della bottega di gatte inguantate,

"Of a truth these columns with their motto, considering the happy ac"quisition of the West Indies, which transcends all the glory of the "ancient Romans, admirably satisfy, in themselves the eye, and in "their meaning the mind, of all beholders."

"This imprese," says Ruscelli, "which has long been made so "glorious all over the world, I leave both in its form and in its words, "as it has been everywhere published. But I may say that the great "Emperor, whose device it was, did not apply to it the words Plus "ultra, but Plus oultre, which are Burgundian or French words. So "read, they are fitting and elegant. But to say Plus ultra is neither "good Latin, nor is it any other language; it being well known that "in pure Latin these two words, Plus and Ultra, cannot be conjoined any more than Plus Apud, Plus Ante, Plus Citra, Plus Extra, Plus "Inter, or Plus Super. It is no great wonder, indeed, that Italian or "other painters or sculptors, understanding neither Latin ner Burgun"dian, should have made the device speak in their own way, and that "taking Plus for Latin, they should have taken Oultre for a blunder, "and corrected it into Ultra."

'Ruscelli seems to have doubted Giovio's account of the authorship of the device. As editor of one of the reprints of Giovio's book, and a writer on Impreses who had himself made considerable use of it, he must have known that Giovio attributed the invention to Marliano. But he not only, in the above passage, passes over in silence the name of the Bishop of Tuy, but, elsewhere, seems to disallow his claim by remarking that "it is not clear" whether the Emperor's device “was "the work of that supreme Prince himself, or whether it had been put "into his mind by God, in augury of his becoming master of new "worlds unknown to the ancients," and of the career in which "he surpassed the achievements, the virtues, and the glory of all other "princes."

One pre-eminence the Device of Charles V. may claim, that of being the sole survivor of its countless and fanciful brotherhood. Of the Amorous and Military Impreses of Giovio, the Illustrious Impreses of Ruscelli, the Heroical Devices of Paradin, the vast repertory of Papal, Imperial, Royal, and Princely Symbols of Egidius Sadeler, the more select English Impreses of our own Camden, there is hardly one except the Pillars and Plus ultra which has remained familiar to the eyes of nineteenth-century men. The most famous of these inventions are now to be found only in old books or buildings, or in buildings or books which seek to revive the associations of the past. Granada and Toledo, Lisbon and Coimbra, in their proud chapels and monumental convents,

ma d'argutissimi Maestri." S. Daniel (Sheet B, last leaf) renders them "Commonly these picked Imprese spring not of light braines but of rare wittes;" preserving the general sense of the passage, but suppressing the image of the gatte inguantate. "Puss in gloves" is a figure of Italian speech, for which another most reverend prelate, eminent in proverbial lore, the Archbishop of Dublin, has been good enough to suggest 'Tom Allthumbs," an old colloquial representative of unhandiness, as the nearest English equivalent.'

still display the Ox-Yoke and the Arrow-Sheaf of Ferdinand and Isabella, and the Sphere of Emanuel. The Salamander of Francis and the Crescents of Henry enrich the gay friezes and the carven panels at Chambord and Fontainebleau. In Vignola's exquisite halls, at desolate Caprarola, the Arrow and Butt and the Thunderbolt recall the restless ambition and the various fortunes of the Farnese. The numberless Devices of the Medici, the Yoke of Leo X., the Three interlaced Rings of Cosmo, the Ring and three Feathers, white green and red, of Lorenzo, the Falcon and Ring of Pietro, the Sun and Crystal Ball of Clement VII., the Comet of the gay and gallant Cardinal Hippolito, the Rhinoceros of the wretched Duke Alessandro, still linger in the inlaid work and delicate frescoes of the palaces and villas that fringe the Arno, or hang on the brow of Fiesole. In our own New Palace of Westminster much well-smutted sculpture tells in ponderous Portcullis and bossy Rose of the royal lines of Plantagenet and Tudor. But whether addressing the solitary stranger or the busy crowd, these venerable symbols speak to unlearned eyes in a dead and forgotten language.

To the Pillars and Plus Ultra of Charles V. fate has accorded a longer span of life and a fuller measure of fame. Adopted by all his successors in the Spanish monarchy, and used as an adjunct of the royal arms, the columns of Hercules, tagged with their bad Latin, have long formed a distinguishing feature of the coinage of Spain.* Of all children of the mint, the Pillar Dollar has perhaps had the freest course from China to Peru, and has been the most honoured symbol of the wealth, and the most active agent of the commerce, of mankind.

There is another Device which Charles V. is said to have chosen for himself and sketched with his own hand, under circumstances which ought to render it illustrious amongst emblems. The story, it must be confessed, rests only on the authority of Anton-franceso Doni, a contemporary Italian writer, whose veracity is perhaps not unimpeachable, and who lost no opportunity of flattering the great. But the Emperor was dead before the anecdote was committed to writing, and nearly three centuries passed before it found its way to the press.

"See now," says Doni, "what the great Emperor, the unvanquished “Charles V., did when his majesty had against him the sea, and the "weather, and fortune, in the heavy rain and cruel tempest which "assailed him at Algiers. So soon as he was gotten on shipboard, with "as much of his army as he could save, he set himself to draw a branch "of coral, and with his own hand wrote upon the rock on which it was "lashed and beaten with the waves, Resisto. As coral can be hurt "neither by the lightning nor by the waves of the sea, under this figure he would show that in every fortune he was most constant and "bold."

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This last-mentioned Impresa is now, we believe, first made known to the world from a manuscript in the possession of the author.

The title of Emperor in the sixteenth century had still about

*They are on the coins of the present revolutionary government.'

it a grandeur in which no secondary monarch shared. Francis I. and Henry VIII. were kings of no common mould and power, but Emperor there was but one, and the Fleming Charles, combining in his own person the inheritance of Burgundy, Spain, Austria, and the Indies, with the choice of the Holy Roman Electors, filled the loftiest throne and enjoyed the broadest sway that has fallen to the lot of any son of man. The office,' says Sir William, with even more than his wonted pungency, was surrounded with august and venerable associations which we can now but imperfectly recall. Heir of the universal sway of Rome, the holder of it claimed to be the ⚫ suzerain of all earthly kings. First and oldest of European 'dignities, its very name had a sound of majesty, which it has 'lost since it has been vulgarised by Muscovite and Corsican, by black men and brown men in the New World, and, worst ' of all, degraded by the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine itself, in the meaningless title of Austria, and the bloody infamy of 'Mexico.' With all this grandeur and greatness, and with the singular fortune which attended Charles in most of his enterprises, it is not uninteresting to contrast his bodily infirmities. The following curious details have been collected from various sources, for the most part little known.

Charles V. never enjoyed robust health, and while still in the prime of manhood, was troubled with asthma and gout. His ailments were very generally attributed to his habits of over-eating-habits which often attracted the notice of the ambassadors accredited to him, and were mentioned in their despatches and reports. He was just turned of thirty when his confessor, Cardinal Loayea, wrote to him to urge him to leave off eating fish, which always disagreed with him, and added, "I am told that your chest can often be heard farther off than "your tongue." Subsequent letters from the same honest counsellor contain many similar warnings, one of which closes with these words: "If your Majesty will give the reins to your appetite, I tell you that "your conscience and bodily health must go down hill." The gout attacked him when he was little past thirty, and from his thirty-eighth year was the tormenting companion of his busy and troubled life. In 1549 the French ambassador Marillac wrote to his master Henry II. that the Emperor could not last long-that "he had a downcast jaded look, pale "lips, a face rather like that of a dead than a living man, a lean and "withered neck, a feeble voice, short breath, a very bent back, and "legs so weak that he could hardly crawl, with the help of a staff, from "his chamber to his dressing-room."

Towards the close of 1550, Roger Ascham, secretary to the English ambassador, saw Charles V. at Augsburg, and thus recorded his impressions:-"I have seen the Emperor twice, first sick in his privy chamber at our first coming. He looked somewhat like the parson of "Epurstone. He had on a gown of black taffety, and a furred night