Never did knight meet death more nobly than that Captain Douglas, whose heroism is recorded by Sir William Temple, and who “stood and burnt in one of our ships at Chatham, when his soldiers left him, because it never should be said a Douglas quitted his post without orders.” Except as an example of heroic endurance, this act, however, was in some degree a mistake, for the state did not profit by it. There was something more profitable in the act of Von Speyk, in our own time. When hostilities were raging between Holland and Belgium, in 1831, the young Dutch captain, just named, happened to be in the Scheldt, struggling in his gun-boat against a gale which, in spite of all his endeavors and seamanship, drove him ashore, under the guns of the Belgians. A crowd of Belgian volunteers leaped aboard, ordered him to haul down his colors and surrender. Von Speyk hurried below to the magazine, fell upon his knees in prayer, flung a lighted cigar into an open barrel of powder, and blew his ship to atoms, with nearly all who were on board. If he, by this sacrifice, prevented a Dutch vessel from falling into the enemy’s power, he also deprived Holland of many good seamen. The latter country, however, only thought of the unselfish act of heroism, in one who had been gratuitously educated in the orphan house at Amsterdam, and who acquitted his debt to his country, by laying down his life when such sacrifice was worth making. His king and countrymen proved that they could appreciate the noble act. The statue of Von Speyk was placed by the side of that of De Ruyter, and the government decreed that as long as a Dutch navy existed there should be _one_ vessel bearing the name of Von Speyk. To return to the knights of earlier days, I will observe that indifferent as many of them were to meeting death, they, and indeed other men of note, were very far from being so as to the manner in which they should be disposed of _after_ death. In their stone or marble coffins, they lay in graves so shallow that the cover of the coffin formed part of the pavement of the church. Whittingham, the Puritan Dean of Durham, took up many of their coffins and converted them into horse or swine troughs. This is the dean who is said to have turned the finely-wrought holy-water vessels into salting-tubs for his own use.