storical
disquisitions of great depth and length on questions agitating Europe,
constitutional arguments, drafts of treaties among the leading powers of
the world, instructions to great commissions, plans for European
campaigns, vast combinations covering the world, alliances of empire,
scientific expeditions and discoveries--papers such as these covered now
with the satirical dust of centuries, written in the small, crabbed,
exasperating characters which make Barneveld's handwriting almost
cryptographic, were once, when fairly engrossed and sealed with the great
seal of the haughty burgher-aristocracy, the documents which occupied the
close attention of the cabinets of Christendom.

It is not unfrequent to find four or five important despatches compressed
almost in miniature upon one sheet of gigantic foolscap. It is also
curious to find each one of these rough drafts conscientiously beginning
in the statesman's own hand with the elaborate phrases of compliment
belonging to the epoch such as "Noble, strenuous, severe, highly
honourable, very learned, very discreet, and very wise masters," and
ending with "May the Lord God Almighty eternally preserve you and hold
you in His holy keeping in this world and for ever"--decorations which
one might have thought it safe to leave to be filled in by the secretary
or copying clerk.

Thus there have been few men at any period whose lives have been more
closely identical than his with a national history. There have been few
great men in any history whose names have become less familiar to the
world, and lived less in the mouths of posterity. Yet there can be no
doubt that if William the Silent was the founder of the independence of
the United Provinces Barneveld was the founder of the Commonwealth
itself. He had never the opportunity, perhaps he might have never had the
capacity, to make such prodigious sacrifices in the cause of country as
the great prince had done. But he had served his country strenuously from
youth to old age with an abiding sense of duty, a steadiness of purpose,
a broad vision, a firm grasp, and an opulence of resource such as not one
of his compatriots could even pretend to rival.

Had that country of which he was so long the first citizen maintained
until our own day the same proportionate position among the empires of
Christendom as it held in the seventeenth century, the name of John of
Barneveld would have perhaps been as familiar to all men as it is a