.

The farther he went the braver seemed the country, and the better beloved
his. Lordship. Nothing was left undone, in the language of ancient
chronicle, to fill the bellies and the heads of the whole company. At the
close of the year he came to the Hague, where the festivities were
unusually magnificent. A fleet of barges was sent to escort him. Peter,
James, and John, met him upon the shore, while the Saviour appeared
walking upon the waves, and ordered his disciples to cast their nets, and
to present the fish to his Excellency. Farther on, he was confronted by
Mars and Bellona, who recited Latin odes in his honour. Seven beautiful
damsels upon a stage, representing the United States, offered him golden
keys; seven others equally beautiful, embodying the seven sciences,
presented him with garlands, while an enthusiastic barber adorned his
shop with seven score of copper basins, with a wax-light in each,
together with a rose, and a Latin posy in praise of Queen Elizabeth. Then
there were tiltings in the water between champions mounted upon whales,
and other monsters of the deep-representatives of siege, famine,
pestilence, and murder--the whole interspersed with fireworks, poetry,
charades, and Matthias, nor Anjou, nor King Philip, nor the Emperor
Charles, in their triumphal progresses, had been received with more
spontaneous or more magnificent demonstrations. Never had the living
pictures been more startling, the allegories more incomprehensible, the
banquets more elaborate, the orations more tedious. Beside himself with
rapture, Leicester almost assumed the God. In Delft, a city which he
described as "another London almost for beauty and fairness," he is said
so far to have forgotten himself as to declare that his family had--in
the person of Lady Jane Grey, his father, and brother--been unjustly
deprived of the crown of England; an indiscretion which caused a shudder
in all who heard him. It was also very dangerous for the
Lieutenant-General to exceed the bounds of becoming modesty at that
momentous epoch. His power, as we shall soon have occasion to observe,
was anomalous, and he was surrounded by enemies. He was not only to
grapple with a rapidly developing opposition in the States, but he was
surrounded with masked enemies, whom he had brought with him from
England. Every act and word of his were liable to closest scrutiny, and
likely to be turned against him. For it was most characteristic of that
intriguing a