singular spectacle of two opposing armies, acting in different interests, making conquests, and dividing an important inheritance, without the occurrence of one act of hostility to each other.  But the interference of the court of Madrid had nearly been the cause of a new rupture.  The greatest alarm was excited in the Belgic provinces; and nothing but the prudence of the archdukes and the forbearance of the states-general could have succeeded in averting the threatened evil.

With the exception of this bloodless mimicry of war, the United Provinces presented for the space of twelve years a long-continued picture of peace, as the term is generally received; but a peace so disfigured by intestine troubles, and so stained by actions of despotic cruelty, that the period which should have been that of its greatest happiness becomes but an example of its worst disgrace.

The assassination of Henry IV., in the year 1609, was a new instance of the bigoted atrocity which reigned paramount in Europe at the time; and while robbing France of one of its best monarchs, it deprived the United Provinces of their truest and most powerful friend.  Henry has, from his own days to the present, found a ready eulogy in all who value kings in proportion as they are distinguished by heroism, without ceasing to evince the feelings of humanity.  Henry seems to have gone as far as man can go, to combine wisdom, dignity and courage with all those endearing qualities of private life which alone give men a prominent hold upon the sympathies of their kind.  We acknowledge his errors, his faults, his follies, only to love him the better.  We admire his valor and generosity, without being shocked by cruelty or disgusted by profusion.  We look on his greatness without envy; and in tracing his whole career we seem to walk hand in hand beside a dear companion, rather than to follow the footsteps of a mighty monarch.

But the death of this powerful supporter of their efforts for freedom, and the chief guarantee for its continuance, was a trifling calamity to the United Provinces, in comparison with the rapid fall from the true point of glory so painfully exhibited in the conduct of their own domestic champion.  It had been well for Prince Maurice of Nassau that the last shot fired by the defeated Spaniards in the battle of Nieuport had struck him dead in the moment of his greatest victory and on the summit of his fame.  From that celebrated day he had performed no deed of war that could raise his reputation as a soldier, and all his acts as stadtholder were calculated to sink him below the level of civil virtue and just government.  His two campaigns against Spinola had redounded more to the credit of his rival than to his own; and his whole conduct during the negotiation for the truce too plainly betrayed the unworthy nature of his ambition, founded on despotic principles.  It was his misfortune to have been completely thrown out of the career for which he had been designed by