tedious, and he bestowed all
his tediousness upon My Lords the States-General. Nothing could be more
dismal than these discourses, except perhaps the contemporaneous and
interminable orations of Grotius to the states of Holland, to the
magistrates of Amsterdam, to the states of Utrecht; yet Carleton was a
man of the world, a good debater, a ready writer, while Hugo Grotius was
one of the great lights of that age and which shone for all time.

Among the diplomatic controversies of history, rarely refreshing at best,
few have been more drouthy than those once famous disquisitions, and they
shall be left to shrivel into the nothingness of the past, so far as is
consistent with the absolute necessities of this narrative.

The contest to which the Advocate was called had become mainly a personal
and a political one, although the weapons with which it was fought were
taken from ecclesiastical arsenals. It was now an unequal contest.

For the great captain of the country and of his time, the son of William
the Silent, the martial stadholder, in the fulness of his fame and vigour
of his years, had now openly taken his place as the chieftain of the
Contra-Remonstrants. The conflict between the civil and the military
element for supremacy in a free commonwealth has never been more vividly
typified than in this death-grapple between Maurice and Barneveld.

The aged but still vigorous statesman, ripe with half a century of
political lore, and the high-born, brilliant, and scientific soldier,
with the laurels of Turnhout and Nieuwpoort and of a hundred famous
sieges upon his helmet, reformer of military science, and no mean
proficient in the art of politics and government, were the
representatives and leaders of the two great parties into which the
Commonwealth had now unhappily divided itself. But all history shows that
the brilliant soldier of a republic is apt to have the advantage, in a
struggle for popular affection and popular applause, over the statesman,
however consummate. The general imagination is more excited by the
triumphs of the field than by those of the tribune, and the man who has
passed many years of life in commanding multitudes with necessarily
despotic sway is often supposed to have gained in the process the
attributes likely to render him most valuable as chief citizen of a flee
commonwealth. Yet national enthusiasm is so universally excited by
splendid military service as to forbid a doubt that the sentimen