indicated by King James at the Greenwich dinner. As, after all, he would
have to deal once more with Cecil, the master-spirit of the Spanish
party, it did not seem very probable that the king's whispered
professions of affection for France, his very loud denunciations of
Spanish ambition, and his promises of support to the struggling
provinces, would be brought into any substantial form for human
nourishment. Whispers and big words, touching of glasses at splendid
banquets, and proposing of royal toasts, would not go far to help those
soldiers in Ostend, a few miles away, fighting two years long already for
a square half-mile of barren sand, in which seemed centred the world's
hopes of freedom.

Barneveld was inclined to take an even more gloomy view than that
entertained by the French ambassador. He had, in truth, no reason to be
sanguine. The honest republican envoys had brought no babies to offer in
marriage. Their little commonwealth had only the merit of exchanging
buffets forty years long with a power which, after subjugating the
Netherlands, would have liked to annihilate France and England too,
and which, during that period, had done its best to destroy and dismember
both. It had only struggled as no nation in the world's history had ever
done, for the great principle upon which the power and happiness of
England were ever to depend. It was therefore not to be expected that
its representatives should be received with the distinction conferred
upon royal envoys. Barneveld and his colleagues accordingly were not
invited, with two hundred noble hangers-on, to come down the Thames in
gorgeous array, and dine at Greenwich palace; but they were permitted to
mix in the gaping crowd of spectators, to see the fine folk, and to hear
a few words at a distance which fell from august lips. This was not very
satisfactory, as Barneveld could rarely gain admittance to James or his
ministers. De Rosny, however, was always glad to confer with him, and