It was not at sea and by the agency of his lieutenants that Louis XIV. aspired to gain the victory; he had already arrived at the banks of the Rhine, marching straight into the very heart of Holland.  “I thought it more advantageous for my designs, and less common on the score of glory,” he wrote to Colbert on the 31st of May, “to attack four places at once on the Rhine, and to take the actual command in person at all four sieges... . I chose, for that purpose, Rheinberg, Wesel, Burick, and Orsoy, and I hope that there will be no complaint of my having deceived public expectation.”  The four places did not hold out four days.  On the 12th of June, the king and the Prince of Conde appeared unexpectedly on the right bank of the intermediary branch of the Rhine, between the Wahal and the Yssel.  The Hollanders were expecting the enemy at the ford of, the Yssel, being more easy to pass; they were taken by surprise; the king’s cuirassier regiment dashed into the river, and crossed it partly by fording and partly by swimming; the resistance was brief; meanwhile the Duke of Longueville was killed, and the Prince of Conde was wounded for the first time in his life.  “I was present at the passage, which was bold, vigorous, full of brilliancy, and glorious for the nation,” writes Louis XIV.  Arnheim and Deventer had just surrendered to Turenne and Luxembourg; Duisbourg resisted the king for a few days; Monsieur was besieging Zutphen.  John van Witt was for evacuating the Hague and removing to Amsterdam the centre of government and resistance; the Prince of Orange had just abandoned the province of Utrecht, which was immediately occupied by the French; the defensive efforts were concentrated upon the province of Holland; already Naarden, three leagues from Amsterdam, was in the king’s hands.  “We learn the surrender of towns before we have heard of their investment,” wrote Van Witt.  A deputation from the States was sent on the 22d of June to the king’s headquarters to demand peace.  Louis XIV. had just entered Utrecht, which, finding itself abandoned, opened its gates to him.  On the same day, John van Witt received in a street of the Hague four stabs with a dagger from the hand of an assassin, whilst the city of Amsterdam, but lately resolved to surrender and prepared to send its magistrates as delegates to Louis XIV., suddenly decided upon resistance to the bitter end. " If we must perish, let us at any rate be the last to fall,” exclaimed the town-councillor Walkernier, “and let us not submit to the yoke it is desired to impose upon us until there remain no means of securing ourselves against it.”  All the sluices were opened and the dikes cut.  Amsterdam floated amidst the waters.  “I thus found myself under the necessity of limiting my conquests, as regarded the province of Holland, to Naarden, Utrecht, and Werden,” writes Louis XIV. in his unpublished Memoire touching the campaign of 1672, and he adds, with rare impartiality, “the resolution to place the whole country under