“Unnecessary.  The truth in shortest about matters of importance shall be taken for good style.”

With great love of power, which he was conscious of exerting with ease to himself and for the good of the public, he had little personal vanity, and not the smallest ambition of authorship.  Many volumes might be collected out of the vast accumulation of his writings now mouldering and forgotten in archives.  Had the language in which they are written become a world’s language, they would be worthy of attentive study, as containing noble illustrations of the history and politics of his age, with theories and sentiments often far in advance of his age.  But he cared not for style.  “The truth in shortest about matters of importance” was enough for him; but the world in general, and especially the world of posterity, cares much for style.  The vehicle is often prized more than the freight.  The name of Barneveld is fast fading out of men’s memory.  The fame of his pupil and companion in fortune and misfortune, Hugo Grotius, is ever green.  But Grotius was essentially an author rather than a statesman:  he wrote for the world and posterity with all the love, pride, and charm of the devotee of literature, and he composed his noblest works in a language which is ever living because it is dead.  Some of his writings, epochmaking when they first appeared, are text-books still familiar in every cultivated household on earth.  Yet Barneveld was vastly his superior in practical statesmanship, in law, in the science of government, and above all in force of character, while certainly not his equal in theology, nor making any pretensions to poetry.  Although a ripe scholar, he rarely wrote in Latin, and not often in French.  His ambition was to do his work thoroughly according to his view of duty, and to ask God’s blessing upon it without craving overmuch the applause of men.

Such were the two men, the soldier and the statesman.  Would the Republic, fortunate enough to possess two such magnificent and widely contrasted capacities, be wise enough to keep them in its service, each supplementing the other, and the two combining in a perfect whole?

Or was the great law of the Discords of the World, as potent as that other principle of Universal Harmony and planetary motion which an illustrious contemporary—­that Wurtemberg astronomer, once a soldier of the fierce Alva, now the half-starved astrologer of the brain-sick Rudolph—­was at that moment discovering, after “God had waited six thousand years for him to do it,” to prevail for the misery of the Republic and shame of Europe?  Time was to show.

The new state had forced itself into the family of sovereignties somewhat to the displeasure of most of the Lord’s anointed.  Rebellious and republican, it necessarily excited the jealousy of long-established and hereditary governments.

The King of Spain had not formally acknowledged the independence of the United Provinces.  He had treated with them as free, and there was supposed to be much virtue in the conjunction.  But their sovereign independence was virtually recognized by the world.  Great nations had entered into public and diplomatic relations and conventions with them, and their agents at foreign courts were now dignified with the rank and title of ambassadors.