Holland, understood it, at once conceived a most violent affection
for the Stadtholderate, which had been abolished for ever in Holland by
the "Perpetual Edict" forced by John de Witt upon the United Provinces.

As it rarely happens that public opinion, in its whimsical flights,
does not identify a principle with a man, thus the people saw the
personification of the Republic in the two stern figures of the brothers
De Witt, those Romans of Holland, spurning to pander to the fancies
of the mob, and wedding themselves with unbending fidelity to liberty
without licentiousness, and prosperity without the waste of superfluity;
on the other hand, the Stadtholderate recalled to the popular mind the
grave and thoughtful image of the young Prince William of Orange.

The brothers De Witt humoured Louis XIV., whose moral influence was felt
by the whole of Europe, and the pressure of whose material power Holland
had been made to feel in that marvellous campaign on the Rhine, which,
in the space of three months, had laid the power of the United Provinces
prostrate.

Louis XIV. had long been the enemy of the Dutch, who insulted or
ridiculed him to their hearts' content, although it must be said that
they generally used French refugees for the mouthpiece of their spite.
Their national pride held him up as the Mithridates of the Republic.
The brothers De Witt, therefore, had to strive against a double
difficulty,--against the force of national antipathy, and, besides,
against the feeling of weariness which is natural to all vanquished
people, when they hope that a new chief will be able to save them from
ruin and shame.

This new chief, quite ready to appear on the political stage, and to
measure himself against Louis XIV., however gigantic the fortunes of the
Grand Monarch loomed in the future, was William, Prince of Orange, son
of William II., and grandson, by his mother Henrietta Stuart, of Charles
I. of England. We have mentioned him before as the person by whom the
people expected to see the office of Stadtholder restored.

This young man was, in 1672, twenty-two years of age. John de Witt, who
was his tutor, had brought him up with the view of making him a good
citizen. Loving his country better than he did his disciple, the master
had, by the Perpetual Edict, extinguished the hope which the young
Prince might have entertained of one day becoming Stadtholder. But God
laughs at the presumption of man, who wants to raise and pr