Never perhaps in the whole course of his unresting life were the energies of William more severely taxed, and never did his great moral and intellectual qualities shine forth with a brighter lustre, than in the years 1692-93. The great victory of La Hogue and the destruction of the flower of the French fleet did, it is true, relieve England of any immediate dread either of insurrection or invasion, and so far the prospect before him acquired a slight improvement towards the summer of 1692. But this was the only gleam of light in the horizon; elsewhere the darkness gathered more thickly than ever as the months rolled on. The years 1692 and 1693 were years of diplomatic difficulties and military reverses--the one encountered with unerring sagacity and untiring patience, the other sustained with a noble fortitude. The great coalition of Powers which he had succeeded in forming to resist the ambition of Louis was never nearer dissolution than in the spring of 1692. The Scandinavian states, who had held aloof from it from the first, were now rapidly changing the benevolence of their neutrality into something not easily distinguishable from its reverse. The new Pope Innocent XII. showed himself far less amicably disposed towards William than his two predecessors. The decrepitude of Spain and the arrogant self-will of Austria were displaying themselves more conspicuously than ever. Savoy was ruled by a duke who was more than half suspected of being a traitor. Out of materials so rotten and so ill-assorted as these had the one statesman of the whole group to build up and maintain the barrier which he was bent on erecting against the inroads of France. By what incessant toil and unfailing tact, with what insistences here and concessions there, with what appeals to the vanity of this potentate, the bigotry of that, the cupidity of the third, and the apprehensions of all, he succeeded in keeping them side by side and with their faces to the common enemy it would be impossible to describe, in a manner at all worthy of the subject, within the space at my command. Suffice it to say that William did succeed in saving the league from dissolution, and in getting their armies once more into the field. But not, unfortunately, to any purpose. The campaign of the present year was destined to repeat the errors of the last, and these errors were to be paid for at a heavier cost. Mons had fallen in 1691, through the delays and mismanagement of the allied armies; and in 1692 a greater fortress than Mons was to share its fate. The French king was bent upon the capture of the great stronghold of Namur, and the enemy, as in the case of Mons, were too slow in their movements and too ineffective in their dispositions to prevent it. Marching to the assault of the doomed city, with a magnificence of courtly pageantry which had never before been witnessed in warfare, Louis sat down before Namur, and in eight days its