During his absence they gradually hardened into the forms which they were destined to retain for centuries.

In the history of civil liberty, these incessant contests, these oral and written disquisitions, these sharp concussions of opinion, and the still harder blows, which, unfortunately, were dealt on a few occasions by the combatants upon each other, make the year 1587 a memorable one.

The great questions of the origin of government, the balance of dynastic forces, the distribution of powers, were dealt with by the ablest heads, both Dutch and English, that could be employed in the service of the kingdom and republic.

It was a war of protocols, arguments, orations, rejoinders, apostilles, and pamphlets; very wholesome for the cause of free institutions and the intellectual progress of mankind.

The reader may perhaps be surprised to see with how much vigour and boldness the grave questions which underlie all polity, were handled so many years before the days of Russell and Sidney, of Montesquieu and Locke, Franklin, Jefferson, Rousseau, and Voltaire; and he may be even more astonished to find exceedingly democratic doctrines propounded, if not believed in, by trained statesmen of the Elizabethan school.