Another artist of Dort was Jan Terween Aertz, born in 1511, whose carvings in the choir of the Groote Kerk are among its chief glories.  It is amazing that such spirit and movement can be suggested in wood.  That the very semblance of life can be captured by a painter is wonderful enough; but there seems to me something more extraordinary in the successful conquest of the difficulties which confront an artist of such ambition as this Dort carver.  His triumph is even more striking than that of the sculptor in marble.  The sacristan of Dort’s Groote Kerk seems more eager to show a brass screen and a gold christening bowl than these astounding choir stalls; but tastes always differ.

By the irony of fate it was Dort—­the possessor of Terween’s carving of the Triumph of Charles V. (a pendant to the Triumph of the Church and the Eucharist)—­that, in 1572, only a few years after the carving was made, held the Congress which virtually decided the fate of Spain in the Netherlands.  Brill had begun the revolution (as we shall see in our last chapter), Flushing was the first to follow suit, Enkhuisen then caught the fever; but these were individual efforts:  it was the Congress of Dort that authorised and systematised the revolt.

The scheme of this book precludes a consecutive account of the great struggle between Holland and Spain—­a struggle equal almost to that between Holland and her other implacable foe, the sea.  I assume in the reader a sufficient knowledge of history to be able to follow the course of the contest as it moves backwards and forwards in these pages—­the progress of the narrative being dictated by the sequence of towns in the itinerary rather than by the sequence of events in time.  The death of William the Silent, for example, has to be set forth in the chapter on Delft, where the tragedy occurred, and where he lies buried, long before we reach the description of the siege of Haarlem and the capture of De Bossu off Hoorn, while for the insurrection of Brill, which was the first tangible token of Dutch independence, we have to wait until the last chapter of all.  The reader who is endowed with sufficient history to reconcile these divagations should, I think, by the time the book is finished, have (with Motley’s assistance) a vivid idea of this great war, so magnificently waged by Holland, which lowers in the background of almost every Dutch town.

A later congress at Dort was the famous Synod in 1618-19, in which a packed house of Gomarians or Contra-Remonstrants, pledged to carry out the wishes of Maurice, Prince of Orange, the Stadtholder, affected to subject the doctrines of the Arminians or Remonstrants to conscientious examination.  These doctrines as contained in the five articles of the Arminians were as follows, in the words of Davies, the historian of Holland:  “First, that God had resolved from the beginning to elect into eternal life those who through his grace believed in Jesus Christ, and continued stedfast in