JAMES THE SECOND.

21

of affairs. For a time it seemed to him that resistance washopeless. He looked round for succour, and looked in vain. -Spain was unnerved, Germany distracted, England corrupted.Nothing seemed left to the young Stadtholder but to perishsword in hand, or to be the FEneas of a great emigration, andto create another Holland in countries beyond the reach of thetyranny of France. No obstacle would then remain to checkthe progress Of the House of Bourbon. A few years; andthat House might add to its dominions Loraine and Flanders,Castile and Aragon, Naples and Milan, Mexico and Peru.Lewis might wear the imperial crown, might place a prince ofhis family on the throne of Poland, might be sole master ofEurope from the Scythian deserts to the Atlantic Ocean, andof America from regions north of the Tropic of Cancer toregions south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Such was the pro-spect which lay before William when first he entered on publiclife, and which never ceased to haunt him till his latest day.The French monarchy was to him what the Roman republicwas to Hannibal, what the Ottoman power was to Scanderbeg,what the southern domination was to Wallace. Religion gaveher sanction to that intense and unquenchable animosity.Hundreds of Calvinistic preachers proclaimed that the samepower which had set apart Samson from the womb to be thescourge of the Philistine, and which had called Gideon fromthe threshing floor to smite the Midianite, had raised up Wil-liam of Orange to be the champion of all free nations and ofall pure Churches; nor was this notion without influence onhis own mind. To the confidence which the heroic fatalistplaced in his high destiny and in his sacred cause is to bepartly attributed his singular indifference to danger. Fie hada great work to do; and till it was done nothing could harmhim. Therefore it was that, in spite of the prognosticationsof physicians, he recovered from maladies which seemedhopeless, that bands of assassins conspired in vain against hislife, that the open skiff to which he trusted himself on a star-less night, on a raging ocean, and near a treacherous shore,brought him safe to land, and that, on twenty fields of battle,the cannon balls passed him by to right and left. The ardour

cn.\p.

VII.

1687 .