he disdained laurels, easily enough, as it would stem, to have been
acquired, and denied his soldiers the bloodshed and the suffering for
which they were clamouring.

And yet, after thoroughly weighing and measuring all these circumstances,
it is natural to regret that he did not on that occasion rise upon
Spinola and smite him to the earth. The Lord had delivered him into
his hands. The chances of his own defeat were small, its probable
consequences, should it occur, insignificant. It is hardly conceivable
that he could have been so completely overthrown as to allow the Catholic
commander to do in November what he had tried all summer in vain to
accomplish, cross the Yssel and the Waal, with the dregs of his army, and
invade Holland and Zeeland in midwinter, over the prostrate bodies of
Maurice and all his forces. On the other hand, that the stadholder would
have sent the enemy reeling back to his bogs, with hardly the semblance
of an army at his heels, was almost certain: The effect of such a blow
upon impending negotiations, and especially upon the impressible
imagination of Henry and the pedantic shrewdness of James, would have
been very valuable. It was not surprising that the successful soldier
who sat on the French throne, and who had been ever ready to wager life
and crown on the results of a stricken field, should be loud in his
expressions of disapprobation and disgust. Yet no man knew better than
the sagacious Gascon that fighting to win a crown, and to save a
republic, were two essentially different things.

In the early summer of this year Admiral Haultain, whom we lately saw
occupied with tossing Sarmiento's Spanish legion into the sea off the
harbour of Dover, had been despatched to the Spanish coast on a still
more important errand. The outward bound Portuguese merchantmen and the
home returning fleets from America, which had been absent nearly two