The life of Burleigh was commensurate with one of the most important periods in the history of the world.  It exactly measures the time during which the House of Austria held decided superiority and aspired to universal dominion.  In the year in which Burleigh was born, Charles the Fifth obtained the imperial crown.  In the year in which Burleigh died, the vast designs which had, during near a century, kept Europe in constant agitation, were buried in the same grave with the proud and sullen Philip.

The life of Burleigh was commensurate also with the period during which a great moral revolution was effected, a revolution the consequences of which were felt, not only in the cabinets of princes, but at half the firesides in Christendom.  He was born when the great religious schism was just commencing.  He lived to see that schism complete, and to see a line of demarcation, which, since his death, has been very little altered, strongly drawn between Protestant and Catholic Europe.

The only event of modern times which can be properly compared with the Reformation is the French Revolution, or, to speak more accurately, that great revolution of political feeling which took place in almost every part of the civilised world during the eighteenth century, and which obtained in France its most terrible and signal triumph.  Each of these memorable events may be described as a rising up of the human reason against a Caste.  The one was a struggle of the laity against the clergy for intellectual liberty; the other was a struggle of the people against princes and nobles for political liberty.  In both cases, the spirit of innovation was at first encouraged by the class to which it was likely to be most prejudicial.  It was under the patronage of Frederic, of Catherine, of Joseph, and of the grandees of France, that the philosophy which afterwards threatened all the thrones and aristocracies of Europe with destruction first became formidable.  The ardour with which men betook themselves to liberal studies, at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, was zealously encouraged by the heads of that very church to which liberal studies were destined to be fatal.  In both cases, when the explosion came, it came with a violence which appalled and disgusted many of those who had previously been distinguished by the freedom of their opinions.  The violence of the democratic party in France made Burke a Tory and Alfieri a courtier.  The violence of the chiefs of the German schism made Erasmus a defender of abuses, and turned the author of Utopia into a persecutor.  In both cases, the convulsion which had overthrown deeply seated errors, shook all the principles on which society rests to their very foundations.  The minds of men were unsettled.  It seemed for a time that all order and morality were about to perish with the prejudices with which they had been long and intimately associated.  Frightful cruelties were