th prayers more
blasphemous than any thing that he had ever uttered. Wodrow has told no
blacker story of Dundee. [798]

On the whole, the British islands had not, during ten years, been so
free from internal troubles as when William, at the close of April 1697,
set out for the Continent. The war in the Netherlands was a little,
and but a little, less languid than in the preceding year. The French
generals opened the campaign by taking the small town of Aeth. They then
meditated a far more important conquest. They made a sudden push for
Brussels, and would probably have succeeded in their design but for the
activity of William. He was encamped on ground which lies within
sight of the Lion of Waterloo, when he received, late in the evening,
intelligence that the capital of the Netherlands was in danger. He
instantly put his forces in motion, marched all night, and, having
traversed the field destined to acquire, a hundred and eighteen years
later, a terrible renown, and threaded the long defiles of the Forest of
Soignies, he was at ten in the morning on the spot from which Brussels
had been bombarded two years before, and would, if he had been only
three hours later, have been bombarded again. Here he surrounded himself
with entrenchments which the enemy did not venture to attack. This was
the most important military event which, during that summer, took place
in the Low Countries. In both camps there was an unwillingness to run
any great risk on the eve of a general pacification.

Lewis had, early in the spring, for the first time during his long
reign, spontaneously offered equitable and honourable conditions to his
foes. He had declared himself willing to relinquish the conquests which
he had made in the course of the war, to cede Lorraine to its own Duke,
to give back Luxemburg to Spain, to give back Strasburg to the Empire
and to acknowledge the existing government of England. [799]

Those who remembered the great woes which his faithless and merciless
ambition had brought on Europe might well suspect that this unwonted
moderation was not to be ascribed to sentiments of justice or humanity.
But, whatever might be his motive for proposing such terms, it was
plainly the interest and the duty of the Confederacy to accept them.
For there was little hope indeed of wringing from him by war concessions
larger than those which he now tendered as the price of peace. The most
sanguine of his enemies could hardly expect a lon