The Works of Frederick Schiller Author:Friedrich Schiller Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: prevented from dipping their handkerchiefs in the streaming blood, and carrying home with them these precious memorials. SIEGE OF ANTWERP BY THE PRINCE OF ... more »PARMA, IN THE SEARS 1584 ASD 1585. It is an interesting spectacle to ohserve the struggle of man's inventive genius in conflict with powerful opposing elements, and to see the difficulties, which are insurmountable to ordinary capacities, overcome by prudence, resolution, and a determined will. Less attractive, but only the more instructive, perhaps, is the contrary spectacle, where the absence of those qualities renders all efforts of genius vain, throws away all the favours of fortune, and where inability to improve such advantages renders hopeless a success which otherwise seemed sure and inevitable. Examples of both kinds are afforded by the celebrated siege of Antwerp, by the Spaniards, towards the close of the sixteenth century, by which that flourishing city was for ever deprived of its commercial prosperity, but which, on the other hand, conferred immortal fame on the general who undertook and accomplished it. Twelve years had the war continued, which the northern provinces of Belgium had commenced at first in vindication simply of their religious freedom, and the privileges of their states, from the encroachments of the Spanish viceroy, but maintained latterly in the hope of establishing their inde pendence of the Spanish crown. Never completely victors, but never entirely vanquished, they wearied out the Spanish valour by tedious operations on an unfavourable soil, and exhausted the wealth of the sovereign of both the Indies, while they themselves were called beggars, and in a degree actuallywere so. The League of Ghent, which had united the whole Netherlands, Roman Catholic and Protestant, in a common a...« less