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 1689 (, Diary, 25 Feb. 1690; Norden's map of the north-west of Europe still remains over the chimneypiece in the king's gallery, together with the dial-hand showing the quarter whence the wind was blowing which delighted Peter the Great on his private visit to William in 1698). In his later years he resided much at Hampton Court, which he also largely improved; in building he was occasionally extravagant.

The debility of William's constitution, in which the seeds of disease long lurked, accounts for the gradual physical collapse which intensified the trials of his last years. His body was weak and thin, and was found after death to contain a quite unusually small quantity of blood (Report, u.s.); his stature was small, almost diminutive. Yet it was impossible to look upon him without being struck by the high spirit and intellectual power perceptible in his countenance, with its aquiline nose, thin compressed lips, and piercing eyes (by which Berwick recognised him when confronted with him after Landen,, ii. 66). In his youth he had thick brown hair. Evelyn (Diary, 4 Nov. 1670) thought him in face much like his mother and his uncle Henry, duke of Gloucester. Among the numerous portraits of him may be mentioned one as an infant with his mother, by Honthorst, 1653, at the Hague; another, at the age of seven, by Cornelius Janssen van Ceulen, in the National Portrait Gallery; and a third, at the age of ten, in the Mauritshuis at the Hague. The portrait of him at the age of three, attributed to Rembrandt, is considered doubtful. The striking portrait of him in armour by Wissing at Kensington Palace was, together with the companion picture of Mary, painted at the Hague for James II. Another portrait of him as Prince of Orange, by Kneller, is also at Kensington. Of a portrait of him (ib.) as stadholder, 1680, a replica at Panshanger is doubtfully attributed to Wissing, by whom is another portrait at Hampton Court. From the period after his accession to the throne date, among others, those by Vollevens or Wissing, and by Van der Schuer in the Hague Musée Municipal, and by Seghers and G. Schalcken, also at the Hague; two by Jan Wyck in the National Portrait Gallery, two by Kneller at Kensington, and one by him at Hatfield. At the Hague are also busts of him by Verhulst and Blommendael. A marble statue of him was set up in the great hall of the Bank of England in 1735 (Gent. Mag. v. 49); another at Hull in 1734 to his memory as ‘our great deliverer.’ The equestrian statue at Petersfield was erected by William Jolliffe, M.P.; yet another, famed in the annals of Irish faction stands in the middle of College Green, Dublin.

[More completely, perhaps, than in the case of any other of our sovereigns, the personal biography of William III is absorbed in the history of his political activity, the materials for which are still growing under the student's hands. The attempts to furnish a connected account of his life and character have not been numerous. He was chiefly known to posterity through Burnet's partial but not disingenuous account (Own Time, vol. ii–ix., here cited in ed. 1832), until Macaulay, doing nothing by halves, established him as the hero of his great whig epic. William's history is here carried on, in the revised portion of the work, to the peace of Ryswyk, in the unrevised to the second Darien expedition, with fragments on the period 1699–1701, and on the king's death. Early treatments of the subject were the whig Boyer's Hist. of King William III, 3 vols. 1702 (including that of James II); Bishop Kennet's, forming vol. iii. of The Compleat Hist. of England, 1706; Durand's Continuation (The Hague, 1734–5) of the Hist. of England by Rapin, who had himself narrated the expedition of 1688 in which he took part, printed as vols. i–iii. of Tindal's Translation; Ralph's Hist. of England (vol. i.) 1744; Harris's New Hist. of the Reign of William III (4 vols. Dublin, 1747); and Smollett's History. The Political Remarks on the Life and Reign of William III, printed in vol. x. of the Harleian Miscellany, were composed during the reign of Queen Anne. For a curious Jacobite history of the reign, entitled A Light to the Blind, see Hist. MSS. Comm. 11th Rep. Trevor's Life and Times of William III (2 vols. 1835) essayed a more personal form of narrative. The chapters concerning William's reign in Hallam's Constitutional History are among the most valuable sections of the work. There is an able sketch of the monarch in contrast to Louis XIV in the first volume of Van Praet's Essais sur l'histoire politique des derniers siècles, Brussels, 1867. In the English translation of Ranke's Englische Geschichte the reigns of William and Mary, and of William, which form a most important part of the work, occupy vols. iv. and v., besides ample illustrations in the Appendix to vol. vi. By far the most elaborate survey, and vindication as a whole, of the European policy of William III, however, is Onno Klopp's monumental Der Fall des Hauses Stuart, vols. i–ix., Vienna, 1875–8. In view of William's family and political connection with the house of Brandenburg, Droysen's Geschichte der preussischen Politik (vols. iii. 3–iv. 1, 1865–7) is useful. The documentary information in Dalrymple's Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland (1790, 3 vols. 2nd edit.) has not been altogether superseded; Dalrymple supplies a generous estimate of the efforts of William's life. Among recent narratives may be mentioned that in Brosch's Geschichte von England, vol. viii.,