e
cared not for style. "The truth in shortest about matters of importance"
was enough for him; but the world in general, and especially the world of
posterity, cares much for style. The vehicle is often prized more than
the freight. The name of Barneveld is fast fading out of men's memory.
The fame of his pupil and companion in fortune and misfortune, Hugo
Grotius, is ever green. But Grotius was essentially an author rather than
a statesman: he wrote for the world and posterity with all the love,
pride, and charm of the devotee of literature, and he composed his
noblest works in a language which is ever living because it is dead. Some
of his writings, epochmaking when they first appeared, are text-books
still familiar in every cultivated household on earth. Yet Barneveld was
vastly his superior in practical statesmanship, in law, in the science of
government, and above all in force of character, while certainly not his
equal in theology, nor making any pretensions to poetry. Although a ripe
scholar, he rarely wrote in Latin, and not often in French. His ambition
was to do his work thoroughly according to his view of duty, and to ask
God's blessing upon it without craving overmuch the applause of men.

Such were the two men, the soldier and the statesman. Would the Republic,
fortunate enough to possess two such magnificent and widely contrasted
capacities, be wise enough to keep them in its service, each
supplementing the other, and the two combining in a perfect whole?

Or was the great law of the Discords of the World, as potent as that
other principle of Universal Harmony and planetary motion which an
illustrious contemporary--that Wurtemberg astronomer, once a soldier of
the fierce Alva, now the half-starved astrologer of the brain-sick
Rudolph--was at that moment discovering, after "God had waited six
thousand years for him to do it," to prevail for the misery of the
Republic and shame of Europe? Time was to show.

The new state had forced itself into the family of sovereignties somewhat
to the displeasure of most of the Lord's anointed. Rebellious and
republican, it necessarily excited the jealousy of long-established and
hereditary governments.

The King of Spain had not formally acknowledged the independence of the
United Provinces. He had treated with them as free, and there was
supposed to be much virtue in the conjunction. But their sovereign
independence was virtually recognized by the world. Great nations