On the 31st of October William landed in England, and prepared for a meeting with his Parliament, to which he could hardly have looked forward with much pleasure. He had a bad account to give and receive. Over the whole Continent, in Spain, Germany, and Italy, as well as Flanders, the allies had met with adverse fortune; at sea the vast "Smyrna fleet" of merchantmen, four hundred strong, had, through the incapacity of our naval commanders, been surprised in the Bay of Lagos by the combined Brest and Toulouse fleets of France, and, its imprudently reduced convoy of twenty English and Dutch sail having been easily mastered, nearly three-fourths of it suffered capture or destruction. His Parliament, however, met him as a matter of fact in a commendably patriotic mood. William made no attempt to ignore the serious losses which the nation had incurred by land and sea, though of the former he said (not perhaps with perfect impartiality towards his own tactical errors) that "they were only occasioned by the great numbers of our enemies, which exceeded ours in all places"; while the latter he described as "having brought great disgrace upon the nation." And, admitting that the charges of the war had already been very great, "I am yet persuaded," he added, "that the experience of the summer is sufficient to convince us all that to arrive at a good end of it there will be a necessity of increasing our forces both by sea and land." The reply of the Commons was cordial, and manifested no hesitation as to granting the increased supplies; and their patriotic spirit encouraged William to hold his ground on a question in which the minds of the allies were just now about to be exercised. Louis XIV., insatiable in war as he had hitherto been, was beginning to feel that he, and still more that France, had had enough of the struggle. Five years of hostilities carried on in half a dozen quarters of Europe, with a failure of the French harvest and the vintage, had almost prostrated the country. Distress was rife in the provinces; even that most patient of people showed signs of disaffection. Louis made private overtures to the States-General with the intention, of course, of his proposals being brought to the ear of William. Through the neutral King of Denmark he signified his willingness to restore all the conquests he had made during the present war, to renounce his pretensions to the Low Countries, and to agree that the Elector of Bavaria should have the Spanish Netherlands in case of the death of the King of Spain, and that the commercial arrangements of Europe should be put on their old footing. The great _crux_ of the negotiations, and of all negotiations with a similar object, was, and was known to be, the question of the recognition or non-recognition of the _de facto_ King and Queen of England. On this question, so far as we can now judge, the mouth-pieces of Louis gave forth an uncertain sound. The King of Denmark told the