historian, and a statesman, which was to be one of the enduring glories
of humanity, all these were the precious possessions of the high school
of Leyden.

The still more modern university of Franeker, founded amid the din
of perpetual warfare in Friesland, could at least boast the name of
Arminius, whose theological writings and whose expansive views were
destined to exert such influence over his contemporaries and posterity.

The great history of Hoofd, in which the splendid pictures and the
impassioned drama of the great war of independence were to be preserved
for his countrymen through all time, was not yet written. It was soon
afterwards, however, to form not only a chief source of accurate
information as to the great events themselves, but a model of style
never since surpassed by any prose writer in either branch of the
German tongue.

Had Hoofd written for a wider audience, it would be difficult to name a
contemporary author of any nation whose work would have been more
profoundly studied or more generally admired.

But the great war had not waited to be chronicled by the classic and
impassioned Hoofd. Already there were thorough and exhaustive narrators
of what was instinctively felt to be one of the most pregnant episodes of
human history. Bor of Utrecht, a miracle of industry, of learning, of
unwearied perseverance, was already engaged in the production of those
vast folios in which nearly all the great transactions of the forty
years' war were conscientiously portrayed, with a comprehensiveness of
material and an impartiality of statement, such as might seem almost
impossible for a contemporary writer. Immersed in attentive study and