^†

All these, however, are but pleasing fantasies, the cobweb visions
of those dreaming varlets, the poets, to which I would not have my
judicious reader attach any credibility. Neither am I disposed to
yield any credit to the assertion of an ancient and rather apocryphal
historian, who alleges that the ingenious Wilhelmus was annihilated
by the blowing down of one of his windmills--nor to that of a writer
of later times, who affirms that he fell a victim to a philosophical
experiment, which he had for many years been vainly striving to
accomplish; having the misfortune to break his neck from the gar-
ret window of the stadt-house, in an ineffectual attempt to catch
swallows, by sprinkling fresh salt upon their tails.

The most probable account, and to which I am inclined to give my
implicit faith, is contained in a very obscure tradition, which
declares, that what with the constant troubles on his frontiers--the
incessant schemings and projects going on in his own pericranium--
the memorials, petitions, remonstrances and sage pieces of advice
from divers respectable meetings of sovereign people--together with
the refractory disposition of his council, who were sure to differ from
him on every point, and uniformly to be in the wrong--all these,
I say, did eternally operate to keep his mind in a kind of furnace
heat, until he at length became as completely burnt out as a Dutch
family pipe which has passed through three generations of hard
smokers. In this manner did the choleric but magnanimous William
the Testy undergo a kind of animal combustion, consuming away
like a farthing rush-light--so that, when grim death finally snuffed
him out, there was scarce left enough of him to bury!

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