r
importunities of those less sagacious than himself; and being also much
influenced by the advice of the English queen and the French king, after
reviewing the most splendid army that even he had ever equipped and set
in the field, crossed the Waal at Nymegen, and the Meuse at Mook, and
then moving leisurely along Meuse--side by way of Sambeck, Blitterswyck,
and Maasyk, came past St. Truyden to the neighbourhood of Thienen, in
Brabant. Here he stood, in the heart of the enemy's country, and within a
day's march of Brussels. The sanguine portion of his countrymen and the
more easily alarmed of the enemy already thought it would be an easy
military promenade for the stadholder to march through Brabant and
Flanders to the coast, defeat the Catholic forces before Ostend, raise
the weary siege of that place, dictate peace to the archduke, and return
in triumph to the Hague, before the end of the summer.

But the experienced Maurice too well knew the emptiness of such dreams.
He had a splendid army--eighteen thousand foot and five thousand
horse--of which Lewis William commanded the battalia, Vere the right, and
Count Ernest the left, with a train of two thousand baggage wagons, and a
considerable force of sutlers and camp-followers. He moved so
deliberately, and with such excellent discipline, that his two wings
could with ease be expanded for black-mail or forage over a considerable
extent of country, and again folded together in case of sudden military
necessity. But he had no intention of marching through Brussels, Ghent,
and Bruges, to the Flemish coast. His old antagonist, the Admiral of
Arragon, lay near Thienen in an entrenched camp, with a force of at least
fifteen thousand men, while the archduke, leaving Rivas in command before
Ostend, hovered in the neighbourhood of Brussels, with as many troops as
could be spared from the various Flemish garrisons, ready to support the
admiral.

But Maurice tempted the admiral in vain with the chances of a general
action. That warrior, remembering perhaps too distinctly his disasters at
Nieuport, or feeling conscious that his military genius was more fitly
displayed in burning towns and villages in neutral territory, robbing the
peasantry, plundering gentlemen's castles and murdering the proprietors,
than it was like to be in a pitched battle with the first general of the
age, remained sullenly within his entrenchments. His position was too
strong and his force far too numerous