storm-washed shoals and shifting sandbanks.

It was something to come to the rescue of England in her great agony, and
help to save her from invasion. It was something to do more than any
nation but England, and as much as she, to assist Henry the Huguenot to
the throne of his ancestors and to preserve the national unity of France
which its own great ones had imperilled. It was something to found two
magnificent universities, cherished abodes of science and of antique
lore, in the midst of civil commotions and of resistance to foreign
oppression. It was something, at the same period, to lay the foundation
of a systew of common schools--so cheap as to be nearly free--for rich
and poor alike, which, in the words of one of the greatest benefactors
to the young republic, "would be worth all the soldiers, arsenals,
armouries, munitions, and alliances in the world." It was something to
make a revolution, as humane as it was effective, in military affairs,
and to create an army whose camps were European academies. It was
something to organize, at the same critical period, on the most skilful
and liberal scale, to carry out with unexampled daring, sagacity, and
fortitude, great voyages of discovery to the polar regions, and to open
new highways for commerce, new treasures for science. Many things of
this nature had been done by the new commonwealth; but, alas! she did not
drape herself melodramatically, nor stalk about with heroic wreath and
cothurn. She was altogether without grandeur.

When Alva had gained his signal victories, and followed them up by
those prodigious massacres which, but for his own and other irrefragable
testimony, would seem too monstrous for belief, he had erected a colossal
statue to himself, attired in the most classical of costumes, and
surrounded with the most mythological of attributes. Here was grandeur.
But William the Silent, after he had saved the republic, for which he had