The Prince of Orange, the great architect of his country's fortunes, would have made it the keystone of the arch which he was laboring to construct.

Had he been allowed to perfect his plan, the structure might have endured for ages, a perpetual bulwark against, tyranny and wrong.

The temporary and slender frame by which the great artist had supported his arch while still unfinished, was plucked away by rude and ribald hands; the keystone plunged into the abyss, to be lost for ever, and the great work of Orange remained a fragment from its commencement.

The acts of demagogues, the conservative disgust at licence, the jealousy of rival nobles, the venality of military leaders, threw daily fresh stumbling-blocks in his heroic path.
It was not six months after the advent of Farnese to power, before that bold and subtle chieftain had seized the double-edged sword of religious dissension as firmly as he had grasped his celebrated brand when he boarded the galley of Muatapha Bey, and the Netherlands were cut in twain, to be re-united nevermore.

The separate treaty of the Walloon provinces was soon destined to separate the Celtic and Romanesque elements from the Batavian and Frisian portion of a nationality, which; thoroughly fused in all its parts, would have formed as admirable a compound of fire and endurance as history has ever seen.
Meantime, the grass was growing and the cattle were grazing in the streets of Ghent, where once the tramp of workmen going to and from their labor was like the movement of a mighty army.