early enough felt by Sebastian the elder--a time [85] like that of
William the Silent, with its insane civil animosities, which would
demand similarly energetic personalities, and offer them similar
opportunities. And then, it was part of his honest geniality of
character to admire those who "get on" in the world. Himself had been,
almost from boyhood, in contact with great affairs. A member of the
States-General which had taken so hardly the kingly airs of Frederick
Henry, he had assisted at the Congress of Munster, and figures
conspicuously in Terburgh's picture of that assembly, which had finally
established Holland as a first-rate power. The heroism by which the
national wellbeing had been achieved was still of recent memory--the
air full of its reverberation, and great movement. There was a
tradition to be maintained; the sword by no means resting in its
sheath. The age was still fitted to evoke a generous ambition; and
this son, from whose natural gifts there was so much to hope for, might
play his part, at least as a diplomatist, if the present quiet
continued. Had not the learned man said that his natural disposition
would lead him out always upon practice?

And in truth, the memory of that Silent hero had its fascination for
the youth. When, about this time, Peter de Keyser, Thomas's brother,
unveiled at last his tomb of wrought bronze and marble in the Nieuwe
Kerk at Delft, the young Sebastian was one of a small company [86]
present, and relished much the cold and abstract simplicity of the
monument, so conformable to the great, abstract, and unuttered force of
the hero who slept beneath.

In complete contrast to all that is abstract or cold in art, the home
of Sebastian, the family mansion of the Storcks--a house, the front of
which still survives in one of those patient architectural pieces by
Jan van der Heyde--was, in its minute and busy wellbeing, like an
epitome of Holland itself with all the good-fortune of its "thriving
genius" reflected, quite spontaneously, in the national taste. The
nation had learned to content itself with a religion which told little,
or not at all, on the outsides of things. But we may fancy that
something of the religious spirit had gone, according to the law of the
transmutation of forces, into the scrupulous care for cleanliness, into
the grave, old-world, conservative beauty of Dutch houses, which meant
that the life people maintained in them was normally affection