[2] The above details of the torture of Cornelius De Witt, who had the fortitude to recite this strophe in the midst of atrocious sufferings, are scrupulously exact. See Basnage, _History of the United Provinces_, vol. II, p. 171.
[3] For letters written by eye-witnesses of these atrocities, see Basnage, _History of the United Provinces; Events of the Campaign of 1672_, published at The Hague, 1675: _The Cry of the Martyrs_, published in the same city, 1673; etc., etc.
[4] It is simply impossible to give the shocking details of their disfigurement.
[5] Facts like these would seem incredible by their savage barbarity, did not authentic witnesses confirm them, almost daily, under the reign of the Grand Monarch. "The military constraint arrived in the town to the sound of bell and drum; then was furnished the melancholy spectacle of the house being demolished, the stones, the beams, the lumber, the iron publicly sold, because the owner had failed to pay his tax, etc., etc."--_Vauban, La Dime Royale_, vol. 1, chap. X. See also the _New Code of Taxes_, or the _Collected Ordinances_, Paris, 1761, article on Military Constraints; Forbonnais, _Researches in Finance, etc._
[6] Even at the end of the Eighteenth Century women among the nobility still often wore masks, especially in the country, to preserve the freshness of their color from the tan.
[7] In the Sixteenth Century, all the chemists who were engaged in the search for the philosopher's stone, a myth then much in vogue, were dubbed "blowers," because of the continual play of their bellows in the operation of fusing metals.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Blacksmith's Hammer, or The Peasant Code, by Eugène Sue