eased to haunt him till his latest day. The French
monarchy was to him what the Roman republic was to Hannibal, what the
Ottoman power was to Scanderbeg, what the southern domination was to
Wallace. Religion gave her sanction to that intense and unquenchable
animosity. Hundreds of Calvinistic preachers proclaimed that the same
power which had set apart Samson from the womb to be the scourge of
the Philistine, and which had called Gideon from the threshing floor to
smite the Midianite, had raised up William of Orange to be the champion
of all free nations and of all pure Churches; nor was this notion
without influence on his own mind. To the confidence which the heroic
fatalist placed in his high destiny and in his sacred cause is to be
partly attributed his singular indifference to danger. He had a great
work to do; and till it was done nothing could harm him. Therefore it
was that, in spite of the prognostications of physicians, he recovered
from maladies which seemed hopeless, that bands of assassins conspired
in vain against his life, that the open skiff to which he trusted
himself on a starless night, on a raging ocean, and near a treacherous
shore, brought him safe to land, and that, on twenty fields of battle,
the cannon balls passed him by to right and left. The ardour and
perseverance with which he devoted himself to his mission have scarcely
any parallel in history. In comparison with his great object he held the
lives of other men as cheap as his own. It was but too much the habit,
even of the most humane and generous soldiers of that age, to think very
lightly of the bloodshed and devastation inseparable from great martial
exploits; and the heart of William was steeled, not only by professional
insensibility, but by that sterner insensibility which is the effect of
a sense of duty. Three great coalitions, three long and bloody wars in
which all Europe from the Vistula to the Western Ocean was in arms,
are to be ascribed to his unconquerable energy. When in 1678 the States
General, exhausted and disheartened, were desirious of repose, his voice
was still against sheathing the sword. If peace was made, it was made
only because he could not breathe into other men a spirit as fierce and
determined as his own. At the very last moment, in the hope of breaking
off the negotiation which he knew to be all but concluded, he fought one
of the most bloody and obstinate battles of that age. From the day on
which the treaty