hoir stalls; but tastes always differ.

By the irony of fate it was Dort--the possessor of Terween's carving
of the Triumph of Charles V. (a pendant to the Triumph of the Church
and the Eucharist)--that, in 1572, only a few years after the carving
was made, held the Congress which virtually decided the fate of Spain
in the Netherlands. Brill had begun the revolution (as we shall see in
our last chapter), Flushing was the first to follow suit, Enkhuisen
then caught the fever; but these were individual efforts: it was the
Congress of Dort that authorised and systematised the revolt.

The scheme of this book precludes a consecutive account of the great
struggle between Holland and Spain--a struggle equal almost to that
between Holland and her other implacable foe, the sea. I assume in
the reader a sufficient knowledge of history to be able to follow
the course of the contest as it moves backwards and forwards in these
pages--the progress of the narrative being dictated by the sequence
of towns in the itinerary rather than by the sequence of events in
time. The death of William the Silent, for example, has to be set forth
in the chapter on Delft, where the tragedy occurred, and where he lies
buried, long before we reach the description of the siege of Haarlem
and the capture of De Bossu off Hoorn, while for the insurrection of
Brill, which was the first tangible token of Dutch independence, we
have to wait until the last chapter of all. The reader who is endowed
with sufficient history to reconcile these divagations should, I think,
by the time the book is finished, have (with Motley's assistance)
a vivid idea of this great war, so magnificently waged by Holland,
which lowers in the background of almost every Dutch town.

A later congress at Dort was the famous Synod in 1618-19, in which
a packed house of Gomarians or Contra-Remonstrants, pledged to
carry out the wishes of Maurice, Prince of Orange, the Stadtholder,
affected to subject the doctrines of the Arminians or Remonstrants to
conscientious examination. These doctrines as contained in the five
articles of the Arminians were as follows, in the words of Davies,
the historian of Holland: "First, that God had resolved from the
beginning to elect into eternal life those who through his grace
believed in Jesus Christ, and continued stedfast in the faith; and,
on the contrary, had resolved to leave the obstinate and unbelieving
to eternal damnation; secondly, that Christ