as it was for the time being. Rapid changes were soon to be expected in
that body, hitherto so staunch for the cause of municipal laws and State
rights.

Meantime Barneveld sat closely guarded in the apartments of the
Stadholder, while the country and very soon all Europe were ringing with
the news of his downfall, imprisonment, and disgrace. The news was a
thunder-bolt to the lovers of religious liberty, a ray of dazzling
sunlight after a storm to the orthodox.

The showers of pamphlets, villanous lampoons, and libels began afresh.
The relatives of the fallen statesman could not appear in the streets
without being exposed to insult, and without hearing scurrilous and
obscene verses against their father and themselves, in which neither sex
nor age was spared, howled in their ears by all the ballad-mongers and
broadsheet vendors of the town. The unsigned publication of the States-
General, with its dark allusions to horrible discoveries and promised
revelations which were never made, but which reduced themselves at last
to the gibberish of a pot-house bully, the ingenious libels, the
powerfully concocted and poisonous calumnies, caricatures, and lampoons,
had done their work. People stared at each other in the streets with
open mouths as they heard how the Advocate had for years and years been
the hireling of Spain, whose government had bribed him largely to bring
about the Truce and kill the West India Company; how his pockets and his
coffers were running over with Spanish ducats; how his plot to sell the
whole country to the ancient tyrant, drive the Prince of Orange into
exile, and bring every city of the Netherlands into a "blood-bath," had,
just in time, been discovered.

And the people believed it and hated the man they had so lately honoured,