audience, it would be difficult to name a
contemporary author of any nation whose work would have been more
profoundly studied or more generally admired.

But the great war had not waited to be chronicled by the classic and
impassioned Hoofd. Already there were thorough and exhaustive narrators
of what was instinctively felt to be one of the most pregnant episodes of
human history. Bor of Utrecht, a miracle of industry, of learning, of
unwearied perseverance, was already engaged in the production of those
vast folios in which nearly all the great transactions of the forty
years' war were conscientiously portrayed, with a comprehensiveness of
material and an impartiality of statement, such as might seem almost
impossible for a contemporary writer. Immersed in attentive study and
profound contemplation, he seemed to lift his tranquil head from time to
time over the wild ocean of those troublous times, and to survey with
accuracy without being swayed or appalled by the tempest. There was
something almost sublime in his steady, unimpassioned gaze.

Emanuel van Meteren, too, a plain Protestant merchant of Antwerp and
Amsterdam, wrote an admirable history of the war and of his own times,
full of precious details, especially rich in statistics--a branch of
science which he almost invented--which still, remains as one of the
leading authorities, not only for scholars, but for the general reader.

Reyd and Burgundius, the one the Calvinist private secretary of Lewis
William, the other a warm Catholic partisan, both made invaluable
contemporaneous contributions to the history of the war.

The trophies already secured by the Netherlanders in every department of
the fine arts, as well as the splendour which was to enrich the coming
epoch, are too familiar to the world to need more than a passing
allusion.

But it was especially in physical science that the republic was taking a
leading part in the great intellectual march of the nations.

The very necessities of its geographical position had forced it to
pre-eminence in hydraulics and hydrostatics. It had learned to transform
water into dry land with a perfection attained by no nation before or
since. The wonders of its submarine horticulture were the despair of all
gardeners in the world.

And as in this gentlest of arts, so also in the dread science of war, the
republic had been the instructor of mankind.

The youthful Maurice and his cousin Lewis William had so restored