It was something to come to the rescue of England in her great agony, and help to save her from invasion.  It was something to do more than any nation but England, and as much as she, to assist Henry the Huguenot to the throne of his ancestors and to preserve the national unity of France which its own great ones had imperilled.  It was something to found two magnificent universities, cherished abodes of science and of antique lore, in the midst of civil commotions and of resistance to foreign oppression.  It was something, at the same period, to lay the foundation of a systew of common schools—­so cheap as to be nearly free—­for rich and poor alike, which, in the words of one of the greatest benefactors to the young republic, “would be worth all the soldiers, arsenals, armouries, munitions, and alliances in the world.”  It was something to make a revolution, as humane as it was effective, in military affairs, and to create an army whose camps were European academies.  It was something to organize, at the same critical period, on the most skilful and liberal scale, to carry out with unexampled daring, sagacity, and fortitude, great voyages of discovery to the polar regions, and to open new highways for commerce, new treasures for science.  Many things of this nature had been done by the new commonwealth; but, alas! she did not drape herself melodramatically, nor stalk about with heroic wreath and cothurn.  She was altogether without grandeur.

When Alva had gained his signal victories, and followed them up by those prodigious massacres which, but for his own and other irrefragable testimony, would seem too monstrous for belief, he had erected a colossal statue to himself, attired in the most classical of costumes, and surrounded with the most mythological of attributes.  Here was grandeur.  But William the Silent, after he had saved the republic, for which he had laboured during his whole lifetime and was destined to pour out his heart’s blood, went about among the brewers and burghers with unbuttoned doublet and woollen bargeman’s waistcoat.  It was justly objected to his clothes, by the euphuistic Fulke Greville, that a meanborn student of the Inns of Court would have been ashamed to walk about London streets in them.

And now the engineering son of that shabbily-dressed personage had been giving the whole world lessons in the science of war, and was fairly perfecting the work which William and his great contemporaries had so well begun.  But if all this had been merely doing great things without greatness, there was one man in the Netherlands who knew what grandeur was.  He was not a citizen of the disobedient republic, however, but a loyal subject of the obedient provinces, and his name was John Baptist Houwaerts, an eminent schoolmaster of Brussels.  He was still more eminent as a votary of what was called “Rhetoric” and as an arranger of triumphal processions and living pictures.