mpossible to harmonize such conflicting duties and
doctrines. Theory had done its best and its worst. The time was fast
approaching, as it always must approach, when fact with its violent besom
would brush away the fine-spun cobwebs which had been so long
undisturbed.

"I will grind the Advocate and all his party into fine meal," said the
Prince on one occasion.

A clever caricature of the time represented a pair of scales hung up in a
great hall. In the one was a heap of parchments, gold chains, and
magisterial robes; the whole bundle being marked the "holy right of each
city." In the other lay a big square, solid, ironclasped volume, marked
"Institutes of Calvin." Each scale was respectively watched by Gomarus
and by Arminius. The judges, gowned, furred, and ruffed, were looking
decorously on, when suddenly the Stadholder, in full military attire, was
seen rushing into the apartment and flinging his sword into the scale
with the Institutes.

The civic and legal trumpery was of course made to kick the beam.

Maurice had organized his campaign this year against the Advocate and his
party as deliberately as he had ever arranged the details of a series of
battles and sieges against the Spaniard. And he was proving himself as
consummate master in political strife as in the great science of war.

He no longer made any secret of his conviction that Barneveld was a
traitor to his country, bought with Spanish gold. There was not the
slightest proof for these suspicions, but he asserted them roundly. "The
Advocate is travelling straight to Spain," he said to Count Cuylenborg.
"But we will see who has got the longest purse."

And as if it had been a part of the campaign, a prearranged diversion to
the more direct and general assault on the entrenchments of the States'
right party, a horrible personal onslaught was now made from many
quarters upon the Advocate. It was an age of pamphleteering, of venomous,
virulent, unscrupulous libels. And never even in that age had there been
anything to equal the savage attacks upon this great statesman. It moves
the gall of an honest man, even after the lapse of two centuries and a
half, to turn over those long forgotten pages and mark the depths to
which political and theological party spirit could descend. That human
creatures can assimilate themselves so closely to the reptile, and to the
subtle devil within the reptile, when a party end is to be gained is
enough to make the very nam