ssary to cast a glance at certain negotiations on delicate
topics which had meantime been occurring between Queen Elizabeth and the
States.

England and the republic were bound together by ties so close that it was
impossible for either to injure the other without inflicting a
corresponding damage on itself. Nevertheless this very community of
interest, combined with a close national relationship--for in the
European family the Netherlanders and English were but cousins twice
removed--with similarity of pursuits, with commercial jealousy, with an
intense and ever growing rivalry for that supremacy on the ocean towards
which the monarchy and the republic were so earnestly struggling, with a
common passion for civil and religious freedom, and with that inveterate
habit of self-assertion--the healthful but not engaging attribute of all
vigorous nations--which strongly marked them both, was rapidly producing
an antipathy between the two countries which time was likely rather to
deepen than efface. And the national divergences were as potent as the
traits of resemblance in creating this antagonism.

The democratic element was expanding itself in the republic so rapidly as
to stifle for a time the oligarchical principle which might one day be
developed out of the same matrix; while, despite the hardy and
adventurous spirit which characterised the English nation throughout all
its grades, there was never a more intensely aristocratic influence in
the world than the governing and directing spirit of the England of that
age.

It was impossible that the courtiers of Elizabeth and the
burgher-statesmen of Holland and Friesland should sympathize with each
other in sentiment or in manner. The republicans in their exuberant
consciousness of having at last got rid of kings and kingly paraphernalia
in their own, land--for since the rejection of the sovereignty offered to
France and England in 1585 this feeling had become so predominant as to
make it difficult to believe that those offers had been in reality so
recent--were insensibly adopting a frankness, perhaps a roughness, of
political and social demeanour which was far from palatable to the
euphuistic formalists of other, countries.

Especially the English statesmen, trained to approach their sovereign
with almost Oriental humility, and accustomed to exact for themselves a
large amount of deference, could ill brook the free and easy tone
occasionally adopted in diplomatic and o