nequal contest.

For the great captain of the country and of his time, the son of William
the Silent, the martial stadholder, in the fulness of his fame and vigour
of his years, had now openly taken his place as the chieftain of the
Contra-Remonstrants. The conflict between the civil and the military
element for supremacy in a free commonwealth has never been more vividly
typified than in this death-grapple between Maurice and Barneveld.

The aged but still vigorous statesman, ripe with half a century of
political lore, and the high-born, brilliant, and scientific soldier,
with the laurels of Turnhout and Nieuwpoort and of a hundred famous
sieges upon his helmet, reformer of military science, and no mean
proficient in the art of politics and government, were the
representatives and leaders of the two great parties into which the
Commonwealth had now unhappily divided itself. But all history shows that
the brilliant soldier of a republic is apt to have the advantage, in a
struggle for popular affection and popular applause, over the statesman,
however consummate. The general imagination is more excited by the
triumphs of the field than by those of the tribune, and the man who has
passed many years of life in commanding multitudes with necessarily
despotic sway is often supposed to have gained in the process the
attributes likely to render him most valuable as chief citizen of a flee
commonwealth. Yet national enthusiasm is so universally excited by
splendid military service as to forbid a doubt that the sentiment is
rooted deeply in our nature, while both in antiquity and in modern times
there are noble although rare examples of the successful soldier
converting himself into a valuable and exemplary magistrate.

In the rivalry of Maurice and Barneveld however for the national
affection the chances were singularly against the Advocate. The great
battles and sieges of the Prince had been on a world's theatre, had
enchained the attention of Christendom, and on their issue had frequently
depended, or seemed to depend, the very existence of the nation. The
labours of the statesman, on the contrary, had been comparatively secret.
His noble orations and arguments had been spoken with closed doors to
assemblies of colleagues--rather envoys than senators--were never printed
or even reported, and could be judged of only by their effects; while his
vast labours in directing both the internal administration and especially
the fore