queraders of the sixteenth century; he enters
the cabinet of the deeply pondering Burghley, and takes from the
most private drawer the memoranda which record that minister's
unutterable doubtings; he pulls from the dressing-gown folds of the
stealthy, soft-gliding Walsingham the last secret which he has
picked from the Emperor's pigeon-holes or the Pope's pocket, and
which not Hatton, nor Buckhurst, nor Leicester, nor the Lord
Treasurer is to see,--nobody but Elizabeth herself; he sits
invisible at the most secret councils of the Nassaus and Barneveld
and Buys, or pores with Farnese over coming victories and vast
schemes of universal conquest; he reads the latest bit of scandal,
the minutest characteristic of king or minister, chronicled by the
gossiping Venetians for the edification of the Forty; and after all
this prying and eavesdropping, having seen the cross-purposes, the
bribings, the windings in the dark, he is not surprised if those who
were systematically deceived did not always arrive at correct
conclusions."

The fascination of such a quest is readily conceivable. A drama with real
characters, and the spectator at liberty to go behind the scenes and look
upon and talk with the kings and queens between the acts; to examine the
scenery, to handle the properties, to study the "make up" of the imposing
personages of full-dress histories; to deal with them all as Thackeray
has done with the Grand Monarque in one of his caustic sketches,--this
would be as exciting, one might suppose, as to sit through a play one
knows by heart at Drury Lane or the Theatre Francais, and might furnish
occupation enough to the curious idler who was only in search of
entertainment. The mechanical obstacles of half-illegible manuscript, of
antiquated forms of speech, to say nothing of the intentional obscurities
of diplomatic correspondence, stand, however, in the way of all but the
resolute and unwearied scholar. These difficulties, in all their complex
obstinacy, had been met and overcome by the heroic efforts, the
concentrated devotion, of the new laborer in the unbroken fields of
secret history.

Without stopping to take breath, as it were,--for his was a task 'de
longue haleine,'--he proceeded to his second great undertaking.

The first portion--consisting of two volumes--of the "History of the
United Netherlands" was published in the year 1860. It maintained and
increased the repu