ndependent. It is an amusing illustration of the
agricultural thrift and republican simplicity of this people that on one
occasion a farmer proposed to Prince Maurice that he should marry his
daughter, promising with her a dowry of a hundred thousand florins.

The mechanical ingenuity of the Netherlanders, already celebrated by
Julius Caesar and by Tacitus, had lost nothing of its ancient fame. The
contemporary world confessed that in many fabrics the Hollanders were at
the head of mankind. Dutch linen, manufactured of the flax grown on their
own fields or imported from the obedient provinces, was esteemed a
fitting present for kings to make and to receive. The name of the country
had passed into the literature of England as synonymous with the delicate
fabric itself. The Venetians confessed themselves equalled, if not
outdone, by the crystal workers and sugar refiners of the northern
republic. The tapestries of Arras--the name of which Walloon city had
become a household word of luxury in all modern languages--were now
transplanted to the soil of freedom, more congenial to the advancement of
art. Brocades of the precious metals; splendid satins and velvets; serges
and homely fustians; laces of thread and silk; the finer and coarser
manufactures of clay and porcelain; iron, steel, and all useful fabrics
for the building and outfitting of ships; substantial broadcloths
manufactured of wool imported from Scotland--all this was but a portion
of the industrial production of the provinces.

They supplied the deficiency of coal, not then an article readily
obtained by commerce, with other remains of antediluvian forests long
since buried in the sea, and now recovered from its depths and made
useful and portable by untiring industry. Peat was not only the fuel for
the fireside, but for the extensive fabrics of the country, and its
advantages so much excited the admiration of the Venetian envoys that
they sent home samples of it, in the hope that the lagunes of Venice
might prove as prolific of this indispensable article as the polders of
Holland.

But the foundation of the national wealth, the source of the apparently
fabulous power by which the republic had at last overthrown her gigantic
antagonist, was the ocean. The republic was sea-born and sea-sustained.

She had nearly one hundred thousand sailors, and three thousand ships.
The sailors were the boldest, the best disciplined, and the most
experienced in the-world, whe