taken by that government from the Simancas archives, a translated epitome of which has been published by Gachard.  This correspondence reaches to the death of Philip ii., and is of immense extent and importance.  Had I not obtained leave to read the invaluable and, for my purpose, indispensable documents at Brussels, I should have gone to Spain, for they will not be published these twenty years, and then only in a translated and excessively abbreviated and unsatisfactory form.  I have read the whole of this correspondence, and made very copious notes of it.  In truth, I devoted three months of last winter to that purpose alone.

The materials I have collected from the English archives are also extremely important and curious.  I have hundreds of interesting letters never published or to be published, by Queen Elizabeth, Burghley, Walsingham, Sidney, Drake, Willoughby, Leicester, and others.  For the whole of that portion of my subject in which Holland and England were combined into one whole, to resist Spain in its attempt to obtain the universal empire, I have very abundant collections.  For the history of the United Provinces is not at all a provincial history.  It is the history of European liberty.  Without the struggle of Holland and England against Spain, all Europe might have been Catholic and Spanish.  It was Holland that saved England in the sixteenth century, and, by so doing, secured the triumph of the Reformation, and placed the independence of the various states of Europe upon a sure foundation.  Of course, the materials collected by me at the Hague are of great importance.  As a single specimen, I will state that I found in the archives there an 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