In particular, Sir, do me the honor to love me, and believe that I honor you singularly.

Impart to me something from your solitude, for I consider your deserts to be more fruitful and fertile than our most cultivated habitations.

As for me, think of me as of a man drowning in the anxieties of the time, but desirous, if possible, of swimming to solitude." Thus solitary, yet thus befriended,--remote from public employment, yet ever employed, doing his daily work with all his soul and strength, Marnix passed the fifteen years yet remaining to him.

Death surprised him at last, at Leyden, in the year 1598, while steadily laboring upon his Flemish translation of the Old Testament, and upon the great political, theological, controversial, and satirical work on the differences of religion, which remains the most stately, though unfinished, monument of his literary genius.

At the age of sixty he went at last to the repose which he had denied to himself on earth.