contemporaries. His genius, eloquence, and learning were esteemed among
the treasures not only of his own country but of Europe. He had been
part and parcel of his country's history from his earliest manhood, and
although a child in years compared to Barneveld, it was upon him that the
great statesman had mainly relied ever since the youth's first appearance
in public affairs. Impressible, emotional, and susceptive, he had been
accused from time to time, perhaps not entirely without reason, of
infirmity of purpose, or at least of vacillation in opinion; but his
worst enemies had never assailed the purity of his heart or integrity of
his character. He had not yet written the great work on the 'Rights of
War and Peace', which was to make an epoch in the history of civilization
and to be the foundation of a new science, but the materials lay already
in the ample storehouse of his memory and his brain.

Possessed of singular personal beauty--which the masterly portraits of
Miereveld attest to the present day--tall, brown-haired; straight-
featured, with a delicate aquiline nose and piercing dark blue eyes, he
was also athletic of frame and a proficient in manly exercises. This was
the statesman and the scholar, of whom it is difficult to speak but in
terms of affectionate but not exaggerated eulogy, and for whom the
Republic of the Netherlands could now find no better use than to shut him
up in the grim fortress of Loevestein for the remainder of his days. A
commonwealth must have deemed itself rich in men which, after cutting off
the head of Barneveld, could afford to bury alive Hugo Grotius.

His deportment in prison was a magnificent moral lesson. Shut up in a
kind of cage consisting of a bedroom and a study, he was debarred from
physical exercise, so necessary for his mental and bodily health. Not
choosing for the gratification of Lieutenant Deventer to indulge in weak
complaints, he procured a huge top, which he employed himself in whipping