Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 134.djvu/700

694 of his wife, who sits at the top and admires her own work in her husband's honor.

The gallery at the Hague is very small, but full of pictures of great interest: not by any means, however, those which are most talked about. The big bull is a disappointment; we have been satiated with beast-painting, and the hairs of his head and the droppings from his nose, wonderful as they are, are too realistic and prosaic to excite any great warmth of enthusiasm. The sleepy sheep, too, are so Poorly painted that they seem as if not by Paul Potter's own hand. Rosa Bonheur's "Horse Fair" is a far higher kind of art.

Here, too, is a fine portrait of Prince Maurice, by Mireveldt, in armor, with a high narrow forehead and peaked beard. There is more even than his father's statesmanlike power in the face, but far less of the benignity. The features of the family of the Nassaus are well worth study. William the Silent and his three brothers had already laid down their lives for the sake of their country, and his son and nine more of the race were devoting their blood, their property, and every energy and talent they possessed to the service of the cause at the time this picture was painted. Few lands, indeed, owe more to one great family than Holland to the race of William.

The bevy of doctors surrounding a subject about to be dissected, foreshortened in a marvellous manner, is not so unpleasant as it sounds, and is a splendid effort of portrait-grouping, natural and lifelike, and of light and shade, but it is not a picture on which one can like to dwell. The portraits of Rubens' first and second wives are full of color, life, and brilliant light; "But I don't know which I should like least for my own wife of those two coquettish ladies," said our companion. There is no good picture of William the Silent; probably he was far too busy with greater interests to remember to be painted; but though the omission seems to be in character with the man, it is not the less to be regretted. The statue on the P1ein is not bad, but it is only a late production; by his side the little dog is immortalized which saved his life, when lying asleep in his tent, by barking so violently that it awakened the prince, on one of the many occasions when his assassination was attempted by order of Philip II.

Two or three lovely little landscapes, full of air and sunshine and distance, with much sky, make one feel as if a hole in the wall were opened admitting the real view. One of these gives that mixture of ships and trees common in Holland, and another the distant sight of a town amidst formal trees and wide meadows, whose realization we soon came upon in Leyden itself, near a small branch of the Rhine, where a great church rising among the trees and red houses has a sort of simulated look of the hull of a ship reversed, very characteristic of its position.

Leyden is now the quietest and most stagnant of learned universities, but with a story to it of the siege by the Spaniards in 1573, than which nothing more moving has happened in the story of our race. The heroic manner in which the inhabitants held out long after any wholesome provisions had been consumed, how they ate horses and dogs, and cats and rats were luxuries; how they dug up the very weeds in the market-place; and even when pestilence broke out from the privations endured by the inhabitants, and carried off thousands of them, still the remainder held out, — is not this written in Mr. Motley's great chronicle of their race?

At length, as the last chance of relieving the city, William the Silent resolved upon opening the great dykes to the sea, and flooding the country so as to drown out the Spaniards and send food to the besieged. The damage to the fields, standing crops, and villages, in July was emormous; it was a measure only to be taken as a last resort, but the danger was imminent, and if Leyden fell the rest of the country must follow. The Estates consented to the risk: "Better a drowned land than a lost land," cried the patriots, and a large capital was subscribed to carry out the work of destruction, as if it had been a commercial enterprise, while the ladies gave their plate and jewellery towards it. The besieged had written to the prince that everything was gone but the malt-cake, and that after four more days nothing but starvation would be left to them. William was lying at Rotterdam so ill with a violent fever, brought on by fatigue and anxiety, that his life was despaired of, but he caused letters to be sent off, which, without mentioning his illness, told them that the dykes were already pierced and that the water was beginning to rise. Great rejoicings took place within the wretched town, cannon were fired, and the Spaniards were surprised at the sounds of music; but Leyden was fifteen miles from the sea dyke, and the flotilla of two hundred vessels, with guns and two thousand five hundred veterans on board, was only able to get as far as a second dyke, still five miles from Leyden. Within