ess of the rites of the Church
of Rome. He had been heard to utter an ominous growl when first he
saw, in his wife's private chapel, an altar decked after the Anglican
fashion, and had not seemed well pleased at finding her with Hooker's
Ecclesiastical Polity in her hands. [219]

He therefore long observed the contest between the English factions
attentively, but without feeling a strong predilection for either side.
Nor in truth did he ever, to the end of his life, become either a
Whig or a Tory. He wanted that which is the common groundwork of both
characters; for he never became an Englishman. He saved England, it is
true; but he never loved her, and he never obtained her love. To him
she was always a land of exile, visited with reluctance and quitted with
delight. Even when he rendered to her those services of which, at this
day, we feel the happy effects, her welfare was not his chief object.
Whatever patriotic feeling he had was for Holland. There was the stately
tomb where slept the great politician whose blood, whose name, whose
temperament, and whose genius he had inherited. There the very sound of
his title was a spell which had, through three generations, called forth
the affectionate enthusiasm of boors and artisans. The Dutch language
was the language of his nursery. Among the Dutch gentry he had chosen
his early friends. The amusements, the architecture, the landscape of
his native country, had taken hold on his heart. To her he turned with
constant fondness from a prouder and fairer rival. In the gallery of
Whitehall he pined for the familiar House in the Wood at the Hague, and
never was so happy as when he could quit the magnificence of Windsor for
his far humbler seat at Loo. During his splendid banishment it was his
consolation to create round him, by building, planting, and digging, a
scene which might remind him of the formal piles of red brick, of the
long canals, and of the symmetrical flower beds amidst which his early
life had been passed. Yet even his affection for the land of his birth
was subordinate to another feeling which early became supreme in his
soul, which mixed itself with all his passions, which impelled him
to marvellous enterprises, which supported him when sinking under
mortification, pain, sickness, and sorrow, which, towards the close of
his career, seemed during a short time to languish, but which soon broke
forth again fiercer than ever, and continued to animate him even while