was the bill of fare.  The next day the Lieutenant-General returned the compliment to the magistrates of Middelburg with a tremendous feast.  Then came an interlude of unexpected famine; for as the Earl sailed with his suite in a fleet of two hundred vessels for Dort—­a voyage of not many hours’ usual duration—­there descended a mighty frozen fog upon the waters, and they lay five whole days and nights in their ships, almost starved with hunger and cold—­offering in vain a “pound of silver for a pound of bread.”  Emerging at last from this dismal predicament, he landed at Dort, and so went to Rotterdam and Delft, everywhere making his way through lines of musketeers and civic functionaries, amid roaring cannon, pealing bells, burning cressets, blazing tar-barrels, fiery winged dragons, wreaths of flowers, and Latin orations.

The farther he went the braver seemed the country, and the better beloved his.  Lordship.  Nothing was left undone, in the language of ancient chronicle, to fill the bellies and the heads of the whole company.  At the close of the year he came to the Hague, where the festivities were unusually magnificent.  A fleet of barges was sent to escort him.  Peter, James, and John, met him upon the shore, while the Saviour appeared walking upon the waves, and ordered his disciples to cast their nets, and to present the fish to his Excellency.  Farther on, he was confronted by Mars and Bellona, who recited Latin odes in his honour.  Seven beautiful damsels upon a stage, representing the United States, offered him golden keys; seven others equally beautiful, embodying the seven sciences, presented him with garlands, while an enthusiastic barber adorned his shop with seven score of copper basins, with a wax-light in each, together with a rose, and a Latin posy in praise of Queen Elizabeth.  Then there were tiltings in the water between champions mounted upon whales, and other monsters of the deep-representatives of siege, famine, pestilence, and murder—­the whole interspersed with fireworks, poetry, charades, and Matthias, nor Anjou, nor King Philip, nor the Emperor Charles, in their triumphal progresses, had been received with more spontaneous or more magnificent demonstrations.  Never had the living pictures been more startling, the allegories more incomprehensible, the banquets more elaborate, the orations more tedious.  Beside himself with rapture, Leicester almost assumed the God.  In Delft, a city which he described as “another London almost for beauty and fairness,” he is said so far to have forgotten himself as to declare that his family had—­in the person of Lady Jane Grey, his father, and brother—­been unjustly deprived of the crown of England; an indiscretion which caused a shudder in all who heard him.  It was also very dangerous for the Lieutenant-General to exceed the bounds of becoming modesty at that momentous epoch.  His power, as we shall soon have occasion to observe, was anomalous, and he was surrounded by