^†

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 garret 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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