greeting with a fellow-servant in the Barneveld mansion who happened to
be crossing the courtyard. Instantly workmen were sent to close and
barricade the windows, and it was only after earnest remonstrances and
pledges that this resolve to consign the Advocate to darkness was
abandoned.

He was not permitted the help of lawyer, clerk, or man of business.
Alone and from his chamber of bondage, suffering from bodily infirmities
and from the weakness of advancing age, he was compelled to prepare his
defence against a vague, heterogeneous collection of charges, to meet
which required constant reference, not only to the statutes, privileges,
and customs of the country and to the Roman law, but to a thousand minute
incidents out of which the history of the Provinces during the past dozen
years or more had been compounded.

It is true that no man could be more familiar with the science and
practice of the law than he was, while of contemporary history he was
himself the central figure. His biography was the chronicle of his
country. Nevertheless it was a fearful disadvantage for him day by day
to confront two dozen hostile judges comfortably seated at a great table
piled with papers, surrounded by clerks with bags full of documents and
with a library of authorities and precedents duly marked and dog's-eared
and ready to their hands, while his only library and chronicle lay in his
brain. From day to day, with frequent intermissions, he was led down
through the narrow turret-stairs to a wide chamber on the floor
immediately below his prison, where a temporary tribunal had been
arranged for the special commission.

There had been an inclination at first on the part of his judges to
treat him as a criminal, and to require him to answer, standing, to the