other faster than the other advanced towards him.  If therefore one of them perceived that he had inadvertently stepped forward too quick, he went back to the door, and the stately minuet began again.  The ministers of Lewis drew up a paper in their own language.  The German statesmen protested against this innovation, this insult to the dignity of the Holy Roman Empire, this encroachment on the rights of independent nations, and would not know any thing about the paper till it had been translated from good French into bad Latin.  In the middle of April it was known to every body at the Hague that Charles the Eleventh, King of Sweden, was dead, and had been succeeded by his son; but it was contrary to etiquette that any of the assembled envoys should appear to be acquainted with this fact till Lilienroth had made a formal announcement; it was not less contrary to etiquette that Lilienroth should make such an announcement till his equipages and his household had been put into mourning; and some weeks elapsed before his coachmakers and tailors had completed their task.  At length, on the twelfth of June, he came to Ryswick in a carriage lined with black and attended by servants in black liveries, and there, in full congress, proclaimed that it had pleased God to take to himself the most puissant King Charles the Eleventh.  All the Ambassadors then condoled with him on the sad and unexpected news, and went home to put off their embroidery and to dress themselves in the garb of sorrow.  In such solemn trifling week after week passed away.  No real progress was made.  Lilienroth had no wish to accelerate matters.  While the congress lasted, his position was one of great dignity.  He would willingly have gone on mediating for ever; and he could not go on mediating, unless the parties on his right and on his left went on wrangling.805

In June the hope of peace began to grow faint.  Men remembered that the last war had continued to rage, year after year, while a congress was sitting at Nimeguen.  The mediators had made their entrance into that town in February 1676.  The treaty had not been signed till February 1679.  Yet the negotiation of Nimeguen had not proceeded more slowly than the negotiation of Ryswick.  It seemed but too probable that the eighteenth century would find great armies still confronting each other on the Meuse and the Rhine, industrious populations still ground down by taxation, fertile provinces still lying waste, the ocean still made impassable by corsairs, and the plenipotentiaries still exchanging notes, drawing up protocols, and wrangling about the place where this minister should sit, and the title by which that minister should be called.