whose carvings in the choir of the Groote Kerk are among its chief
glories. It is amazing that such spirit and movement can be suggested
in wood. That the very semblance of life can be captured by a painter
is wonderful enough; but there seems to me something more extraordinary
in the successful conquest of the difficulties which confront an artist
of such ambition as this Dort carver. His triumph is even more striking
than that of the sculptor in marble. The sacristan of Dort's Groote
Kerk seems more eager to show a brass screen and a gold christening
bowl than these astounding choir stalls; but tastes always differ.

By the irony of fate it was Dort--the possessor of Terween's carving
of the Triumph of Charles V. (a pendant to the Triumph of the Church
and the Eucharist)--that, in 1572, only a few years after the carving
was made, held the Congress which virtually decided the fate of Spain
in the Netherlands. Brill had begun the revolution (as we shall see in
our last chapter), Flushing was the first to follow suit, Enkhuisen
then caught the fever; but these were individual efforts: it was the
Congress of Dort that authorised and systematised the revolt.

The scheme of this book precludes a consecutive account of the great
struggle between Holland and Spain--a struggle equal almost to that
between Holland and her other implacable foe, the sea. I assume in
the reader a sufficient knowledge of history to be able to follow
the course of the contest as it moves backwards and forwards in these
pages--the progress of the narrative being dictated by the sequence
of towns in the itinerary rather than by the sequence of events in
time. The death of William the Silent, for example, has to be set forth
in the chapter on Delft, where the tragedy occurred, and where he lies
buried, long before we reach the description of the siege of Haarlem
and the capture of De Bossu off Hoorn, while for the insurrection of