William of Orange may perhaps be most truthfully described as an overcomer of difficulties. Probably no other man ever had so many difficulties to conquer as he had, and his triumph over them is one of the finest examples of irresistible will-power and purely intellectual force that all history has to show. Mentally he was a giant, and as such he acquitted himself in what was undoubtedly a battle of giants fighting for the spoils of Europe. Physically he was a miserable weakling, shattered by disease, seldom free from bodily pain, and foredoomed from his youth by an exhausting and incurable malady. Yet even his sports and pastimes were those, not only of a healthy, but even of a robust constitution. His pale, sickly, small-pox-pitted face never flushed save under the stimulus of battle or the chase. He fought his fight with Fate and won it by sheer intellectual strength, yet none of the pleasures of intellect were his. He knew nothing of science, little of literature, and less of art. Apparently fitted by Nature only for the pursuits of the study, he found his rare moments of real happiness when riding down a stag or a boar in the forests of Windsor or the woods of Flanders, or, sword in hand, leading his men wherever the battle was hottest or the danger the greatest. A creature of contradictions, in short, determined to make himself that which Nature had seemingly _not_ made him, and to do that which he appeared least fitted to do. No one possessing an intelligent grasp of the deplorable state of affairs which obtained in England, and the threatening aspect of matters on the Continent during the last decade but one of the seventeenth century, would have guessed for a moment that this “asthmatic skeleton,” as Macaulay somewhat roughly describes his hero, was the man to turn England’s weakness into strength, and even in defeat to grapple successfully with the colossal Power which was threatening the liberties of Europe. In England the weakness and baseness of the two last Stuart kings had more than undone the work of the great Oliver. He had, as has been shown, made England one of the first Powers in the world, strong at home and respected and even courted abroad. Charles II. had sold his country, or at any rate his own independence and what should have been his royal honour, to France. He had, in fact, exhibited to the world the disgraceful spectacle of an English king who was the pensioner of a foreign monarch.