immense and confused mass of papers, which turned out to be the autograph letters of Olden Barneveld during the last few years of his life; during, in short, the whole of that most important period which preceded his execution.  These letters are in such an intolerable handwriting that no one has ever attempted to read them.  I could read them only imperfectly myself, and it would have taken me a very long time to have acquired the power to do so; but my copyist and reader there is the most patient and indefatigable person alive, and he has quite mastered the handwriting, and he writes me that they are a mine of historical wealth for me.  I shall have complete copies before I get to that period, one of signal interest, and which has never been described.  I mention these matters that you may see that my work, whatever its other value may be, is built upon the only foundation fit for history,—­original contemporary documents.  These are all unpublished.  Of course, I use the contemporary historians and pamphleteers,—­Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English,—­but the most valuable of my sources are manuscript ones.  I have said the little which I have said in order to vindicate the largeness of the subject.  The kingdom of Holland is a small power now, but the Eighty Years’ War, which secured the civil and religious independence of the Dutch Commonwealth and of Europe, was the great event of that whole age.

The whole work will therefore cover a most remarkable epoch in human history, from the abdication of Charles Fifth to the Peace of Westphalia, at which last point the political and geographical arrangements of Europe were established on a permanent basis,—­in the main undisturbed until the French Revolution. . . .

I will mention that I received yesterday a letter from the distinguished M. Guizot, informing me that the first volume of the French translation, edited by him, with an introduction, has just been published.  The publication was hastened in consequence of the appearance of a rival translation at Brussels.  The German translation is very elegantly and expensively printed in handsome octavos; and the Dutch translation, under the editorship of the archivist general of Holland, Bakhuyzen v. d.  Brink, is enriched with copious notes and comments by that distinguished scholar.

There are also three different piratical reprints of the original work at Amsterdam, Leipzig, and London.  I must add that I had nothing to do with the translation in any case.  In fact, with the exception of M. Guizot, no one ever obtained permission of me to publish translations, and I never knew of the existence of them until I read of it in the journals. . . .  I forgot to say that among the collections already thoroughly examined by me is that portion of the Simancas archives still retained in the Imperial archives of France.  I spent a considerable time in Paris