The fever of the Prince had, meanwhile, reached its height.  He lay at Rotterdam, utterly prostrate in body, and with mind agitated nearly to delirium, by the perpetual and almost unassisted schemes which he was constructing.  Relief, not only for Leyden, but for the whole country, now apparently sinking into the abyss, was the vision which he pursued as he tossed upon his restless couch.  Never was illness more unseasonable.  His attendants were in despair, for it was necessary that his mind should for a time be spared the agitation of business.  The physicians who attended him agreed, as to his disorder, only in this, that it was the result of mental fatigue and melancholy, and could be cured only by removing all distressing and perplexing subjects from his thoughts, but all the physicians in the world could not have succeeded in turning his attention for an instant from the great cause of his country.  Leyden lay, as it were, anxious and despairing at his feet, and it was impossible for him to close his ears to her cry.  Therefore, from his sick bed he continued to dictate; words of counsel and encouragement to the city; to Admiral Boisot, commanding, the fleet, minute directions and precautions.  Towards the end of August a vague report had found its way into his sick chamber that Leyden had fallen, and although he refused to credit the tale, yet it served to harass his mind, and to heighten fever.  Cornelius Van Mierop, Receiver General of Holland, had occasion to visit him at Rotterdam, and strange to relate, found the house almost deserted.  Penetrating, unattended, to the Prince’s bed-chamber, he found him lying quite alone.  Inquiring what had become, of all his attendants, he was answered by the Prince, in a very feeble voice, that he had sent them all away.  The Receiver-General seems, from this, to have rather hastily arrived at the conclusion that the Prince’s disorder was the pest, and that his servants and friends had all deserted him from cowardice.

This was very far from being the case.  His private secretary and his maitre d’hotel watched, day and night, by his couch, and the best physicians of the city were in constant attendance.  By a singular accident; all had been despatched on different errands, at the express desire of their master, but there had never been a suspicion that his disorder was the pest, or pestilential.  Nerves of steel, and a frame of adamant could alone have resisted the constant anxiety and the consuming fatigue to which he had so long been exposed.  His illness had been aggravated by the, rumor of Leyden’s fall, a fiction which Cornelius Mierop was now enabled flatly to contradict.  The Prince began to mend from that hour.  By the end of the first week of September, he wrote along letter to his brother, assuring him of his convalescence, and expressing, as usual; a calm confidence in the divine decrees—­“God will ordain for me,” said he, “all which is necessary for my good and my salvation.  He will load me with no more afflictions than the fragility of this nature can sustain.”