aid into the public treasury. He had been overruled, he
said, but that any dispassionate man of tolerable intelligence could
imagine him, whose whole life had been a perpetual offence to Spain, to
be in suspicious relations with that power seemed to him impossible. The
most intense party spirit, yea, envy itself, must confess that he had
been among the foremost to take up arms for his country's liberties, and
had through life never faltered in their defence. And once more in that
mean chamber, and before a row of personal enemies calling themselves
judges, he burst into an eloquent and most justifiable sketch of the
career of one whom there was none else to justify and so many to assail.

From his youth, he said, he had made himself by his honourable and
patriotic deeds hopelessly irreconcilable with the Spaniards. He was one
of the advocates practising in the Supreme Court of Holland, who in the
very teeth of the Duke of Alva had proclaimed him a tyrant and had sworn
obedience to the Prince of Orange as the lawful governor of the land. He
was one of those who in the same year had promoted and attended private
gatherings for the advancement of the Reformed religion. He had helped to
levy, and had contributed to, funds for the national defence in the early
days of the revolt. These were things which led directly to the Council
of Blood and the gibbet. He had borne arms himself on various bloody
fields and had been perpetually a deputy to the rebel camps. He had been
the original mover of the Treaty of Union which was concluded between the
Provinces at Utrecht. He had been the first to propose and to draw up the
declaration of Netherland independence and the abjuration of the King of
Spain. He had been one of those who had drawn and passed the Act
establishing the late Prince of Orange as stadholder. Of the sixty
signers of these memorable declarations none were now living save himself
and two others. When the Prince had been assassinated, he had done his
best to secure for his son Maurice the sovereign position of which murder
had so suddenly deprived the father. He had been member of the memorable
embassies to France and England by which invaluable support for the
struggling Provinces had been obtained.

And thus he rapidly sketched the history of the great war of independence
in which he had ever been conspicuously employed on the patriotic side.
When the late King of France at the close of the century had made peace
w