xample, or of
earthen pots, watering-cans, baskets, and buckets--which dangle from the
ceiling to the ground, and sometimes almost hide the floor. The shop
signs are like those at Rotterdam--a bottle of beer hanging from a nail,
a paint-brush, a box, a broom, and the customary huge heads with
wide-open mouths.

The new church, founded toward the end of the fourteenth century, is
to Holland what Westminster Abbey is to England. It is a large
edifice, sombre without and bare within--a prison rather than a house
of God. The tombs are at the end, behind the enclosure of the benches.

I had scarcely entered before I saw the splendid mausoleum of William the
Silent, but the sexton stopped me before the very simple tomb of Hugh
Grotius, the _prodigium Europae_, as the epitaph calls him, the great
jurisconsult of the seventeenth century--that Grotius who wrote Latin
verses at the age of nine, who composed Greek odes at eleven, who at
fourteen indited philosophical theses, who three years later accompanied
the illustrious Barneveldt in his embassy to Paris, where Henry IV.
presented him to his court, saying, "Behold the miracle of Holland!" that
Grotius who at eighteen years of age was illustrious as a poet, as a
theologian, as a commentator, as an astronomer, who had written a poem on
the town of Ostend which Casaubon translated into Greek measures and
Malesherbes into French verse; that Grotius who when hardly twenty-four
years old occupied the post of advocate-general of Holland and Zealand,
and composed a celebrated treatise on the _Freedom of the Seas_; who at
thirty years of age was an honorary councillor of Rotterdam. Afterward,
when, as a partisan of Barneveldt, he was persecuted, condemned to
perpetual imprisonment, and shut up in the castle of Loewestein, he wrote
his treatise on the _Rights of Peace and War_, which for a long time was
the code of all the publicists of Europe. He was rescued in a marvellous
way by his wife, who managed to be carried into the prison inside a chest
supposed to be full of books, and sent back the chest with her husband
inside, while she remained in prison in his place. He was then sheltered
by Louis XIII., was appointed ambassador to France by Christina of
Sweden, and finally returned in triumph to his native land, and died at
Rostock crowned with glory and a venerable old age.

The mausoleum of William the Silent is in the middle of the church. It
is a little temple of black and white