ated 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.

The Spanish king had likewise refused to them the concession of the right
of navigation and commerce in the East Indies, but it was a matter of
notoriety that the absence of the word India, suppressed as it was in the
treaty, implied an immense triumph on the part of the States, and that
their flourishing and daily increasing commerce in the farthest East and
the imperial establishments already rising there were cause of envy and
jealousy not to Spain alone, but to friendly powers.

Yet the government of Great Britain affected to regard them as something
less th