had sullenly rolled away, while at every point of the horizon they were
seen massing themselves anew in portentous and ever accumulating
strength. At any moment the faint and sickly sunshine in which poor
exhausted Humanity was essaying a feeble twitter of hope as it plumed
itself for a peaceful flight might be again obscured. To us of a remote
posterity the momentary division of epochs seems hardly discernible. So
rapidly did that fight of Demons which we call the Thirty Years' War
tread on the heels of the forty years' struggle for Dutch Independence
which had just been suspended that we are accustomed to think and speak
of the Eighty Years' War as one pure, perfect, sanguinary whole.

And indeed the Tragedy which was soon to sweep solemnly across Europe was
foreshadowed in the first fitful years of peace. The throb of the
elementary forces already shook the soil of Christendom. The fantastic
but most significant conflict in the territories of the dead Duke of
Clove reflected the distant and gigantic war as in a mirage. It will be
necessary to direct the reader's attention at the proper moment to that
episode, for it was one in which the beneficent sagacity of Barneveld was
conspicuously exerted in the cause of peace and conservation. Meantime it
is not agreeable to reflect that this brief period of nominal and armed
peace which the Republic had conquered after nearly two generations of
warfare was employed by her in tearing her own flesh. The heroic sword
which had achieved such triumphs in the cause of freedom could have been
bitter employed than in an attempt at political suicide.

In a picture of the last decade of Barneveld's eventful life his
personality may come more distinctly forward perhaps than in previous
epochs. It will however be difficult to disentangle a single thread from
the great historical tapestry of the Republic and of Europe in which his
life and achievements are interwoven. He was a public man in the fullest