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From the royal archives of Holland I have obtained many most important, entirely unpublished documents, by the aid of which I have endeavoured to verify, to illustrate, or sometimes to correct, the recitals of the elder national chroniclers; and I have derived the greatest profit from the invaluable series of Archives and Correspondence of the Orange-Nassau Family, given to the world by M. Groen van Prinsterer.
No further fault was found with him, so far as appears, in the discharge of his duties, to which he must have devoted himself faithfully, for he writes to me, under the date of December 27, 1870: "I have worked harder in the discharge of this mission than I ever did in my life." This from a man whose working powers astonished the old Dutch archivist, Groen van Prinsterer, means a good deal.
Thus it is that in the work of M. Groen van Prinsterer, from which I have quoted, he is considered as having been betrayed into error, while his critic recognizes "his manifest desire to be scrupulously impartial and truth-telling." And M. Fruin, another of his Dutch critics, says, "His sincerity, his perspicacity, the accuracy of his laborious researches, are incontestable."
Jacobus Izaak Doedes, Johannes Jacobus van Oosterzee, Chantepic de la Saussaye, the successors of Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, Jan Rudolf Thorbecke's greatest opponent, and Isaaec Da Costa, Willem Bilderdyk's famous pupil, defended the ancient creed, but the General Synod was 'Modern' and the 'Orthodox' had a difficult time.
"Sweet, sweet, sweet," sighed Giacoma Bianchi. "Sweet enough," remarked little thick-set Cornelius Groen from Breda, in broken Italian. "Yet you surely are not thinking of that silly girl, with her flaxen braids, but of the nice honey and the light white pastry she brought us. If we can get that again, I'll ride there with you." "I won't," protested Wilhelm Haldema, from Leuwarden in Friesland.
De Wet, who on January 10 had had a hurried interview with Steyn near Reitz, was lying at Elandskop between Heilbron and Reitz, and again concentrating his scattered burghers and planning an escape with them to the south across the Kroonstad-Bethlehem blockhouse line. Mears, on his way to rejoin De Wet, ran into a column under Byng, to whom he lost the guns captured by De Wet at Groen Kop.
So he grew to be something of a hermit; and all on a sudden he resolved to cut himself adrift from England, and to live abroad. Before his wanderings were over, he was destined to know Europe pretty thoroughly; but at this time his knowledge of it was limited to Paris, and here and there a bit of Northern France. He would break new ground. Antwerp would do as well as any other city for a starting-place, and within a day or two of the hour at which the fancy first occurred to him he was ready to start He crossed by the Baron Osy, took rooms in a hotel on the Groen Plate, and lived and worked there for a month or two under the dropping music of the cathedral chimes. The outfit of a man of letters is the simplest in the world. With a ream of writing-paper, a pint of ink, and sixpennyworth of pens, he is professionally provisioned for half a year. Paul had no need to be in personal touch either with publisher or stage-manager, and he knew his absence from England to be unmarked and unregretted. Annette and he seemed to get on well enough together. There was no real communion between them. Paul was all on fire about his work, and she had no more comprehension of his thoughts than a canary-bird would have had. But it was not possible for a man of his temperament to live constantly under the same roof, and to sit daily at the same table with anybody, male or female, without developing some kind of camaraderie. Mrs. Armstrong seemed to like the life fairly well, and to find a pleasure in the fleeting society of the birds of passage who went and came. She had dresses to her heart's content, and in her pretty gelid way enjoyed a good deal of popularity; but by-and-by, as summer again drew near, she wearied of her surroundings, and incited Paul to move. The work on which he had been engaged was finished and disposed of; there were a good many loose hundreds at the bank, and more were coming. He was ready for a holiday, and for Annette's sake was willing to persuade himself that he was in need of one. So in May weather they set off to make a round of the old Flemish country Ghent, and Bruges, and Aix, and Mechlin. Thence they slid on to Namur, working slowly towards Switzerland in Paul's fancy, but stopping by mere hazard at Janenne, and being by a very simple accident enticed some four or five miles from the main line of their route to Montcourtois. They had been drawn aside in the first place to visit the famous grottoes of Janenne, and the jolly old doyen of Montcourtois was their fellow-passenger in the brake which conveyed them to the station. The old priest was a man of learning, and in his day he had travelled, and had known the world. Paul and he fell into animated converse, and struck up an immediate liking for each other. It turned out, curiously enough, that, though the old gentleman had lived for twenty years within half a dozen miles of the wonderful grottoes, he had never been prompted to visit them until now. He was on the way to wipe out his reproach, and by the time the sight-seeing was over Paul found himself so fascinated by his simplicity, his bonhomie, and the charming, varied stream of his talk, that he must needs invite the old gentleman to dinner at the Hotel of the Three Friends, where preparations for his own reception for the night had been made. The old priest accepted the invitation at once, and early evening found them the only occupants of a great salon in which a hundred people might have dined with case. A brass lamp, suspended by chains from the ceiling, illumined their corner of the' centre table, and at the far end of the room a big stove bloomed red-hot all round like a magnified cherry. These preparations were scarcely needed, for the air was balmy, the windows were open, and the sky was yet full of the evening light of early summer. The voice of a stream not far away ran on with a ceaseless, light-hearted babble, and through the open windows the one street of the village was visible until it swerved away to the left There are a thousand villages like Montcour-tois; but it was the first of its genus Paul had known, and he found a quiet charm in it The Hotel of the Three Friends stood in the Place Publique, dominated by a brand-new town-hall; but all the rest of the place was quaint and old-fashioned. All the houses were distempered in various colours, and all their architects had worked after the decrees of the destinies, so that the street-line itself was full of gable-ends, and the edifices faced in as many directions as was possible. A sturdy, thick-set village girl, neat as a new pin, with cheeks hard and red, and shining like hard red apples, brought in the soup a soupe
It affirmed the general principle that the State schools should be "neutral," but allowed "separate" schools to be built and maintained. This proposal was fiercely opposed by Groen and gave rise to a violent agitation.
From the royal archives of Holland I have obtained many most important, entirely unpublished documents, by the aid of which I have endeavoured to verify, to illustrate, or sometimes to correct, the recitals of the elder national chroniclers; and I have derived the greatest profit from the invaluable series of Archives and Correspondence of the Orange-Nassau Family, given to the world by M. Groen van Prinsterer.
The history which is not open to adverse criticism is worth little, except as material, for it is written without taking cognizance of those higher facts about which men must differ; of which Guizot writes as follows, as quoted in the work of M. Groen van Prinsterer himself.
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