Yet after all these deductions there remains to William, both as a European statesman and as a benefactor to our country, an ample margin of renown. Of his moral and mental stature as a man it is scarcely necessary to speak. It must be patent to all but the dullest prejudices of our day as it was to all but the fiercest passions of his own. It is the highest praise of his high qualities to say that our impression of them easily survives the reaction from idolatry, and that after we have thrown aside the magnifying-glass of Whiggism the objects which it was used to exaggerate still fill the eye. If William had not all the virtues which belong to the patriot and philosopher, he had all that go to the making of the hero. Even Macaulay, who has over painted both his king-craft and his statesmanship, has not laid on the colours of his heroism with too bold a hand. Sagacious as he undoubtedly was in counsel, dexterous as he was in the management of men, keen as was his outlook on European politics, and resourceful as he was in meeting its exigencies, it is possible to contend that his Whig eulogist has credited him with far more than the keenness and sagacity, the dexterity and resource, which he possessed. But such eulogy does not, for it could not, materially exaggerate his great features as a man--his patience of delay and disappointment, his fortitude under disaster, his imperturbable composure in moments of crisis, his lofty magnanimity, which from its high place seemed literally to overlook rather than to forgive injuries, his haughty courage, which thought it equal shame to glance aside at the lurking assassin and to turn away from the open foe. His character was stern, forbidding, unamiable, contemptuously generous, as little fitted to attract love as it was assured of commanding respect; but it bears in every lineament the unmistakable stamp of greatness. And his achievements were as great as his character. His record as a ruler pure and simple, as a mere expert in the art of governing, has never been surpassed, perhaps never equalled, in history. The showy administrative exploits of a Napoleon with vast armies at his back, and the pen of a despotism in his hand, appear to me to sink into insignificance when compared with those of this ruler of four nations--a constitutional sovereign in England and Scotland, the chief of a republic in Holland, and a military autocrat, governing by the sword alone, in Ireland,--who for eleven years successfully directed the affairs of these alien and often mutually hostile communities, and who throughout all that time held in one hand the threads of a vast network of European diplomacy, and in the other the sword which kept the most formidable of European monarchs at bay. Nor should we omit from the comparison that he did all this under moral restraints and physical disadvantages to which Napoleon was a total stranger, impeded by obligations to law, municipal and international, which Napoleon set