the general, which was to widen as time advanced, may be dated from the
day of Nieuport.

Fables have even been told which indicated the popular belief in an
intensity of resentment on the part of the prince, which certainly did
not exist till long afterwards.

"Ah, scoundrel!" the stadholder was said to have exclaimed, giving the
Advocate a box on the ear as he came to wish him joy of his great
victory, "you sold us, but God prevented your making the transfer."

History would disdain even an allusion to such figments--quite as
disgraceful, certainly to Maurice as to Barneveld--did they not point the
moral and foreshadow some of the vast but distant results of events which
had already taken place, and had they not been so generally repeated that
it is a duty for the lover of truth to put his foot upon the calumny,
even at the risk for a passing moment of reviving it.

The condition of the war in Flanders had established a temporary
equilibrium among the western powers--France and England discussing,
intriguing, and combining in secret with each other, against each other,
and in spite of each other, in regard to the great conflict--while Spain
and the cardinal-archduke on the one side, and the republic on the other,
prepared themselves for another encounter in the blood-stained arena.

Meantime, on the opposite verge of what was called European civilization,
the perpetual war between the Roman Empire and the Grand Turk had for the
moment been brought into a nearly similar equation. Notwithstanding the
vast amount of gunpowder exploded during so many wearisome years, the
problem of the Crescent and the Cross was not much nearer a solution in