habitual language of the Lord Treasurer, chief minister of a third-rate
kingdom now called on to play a first-rate part, thoroughly acquainted
with the moral and intellectual power of the nation whose policy he
directed, and prophetically conscious of the great destinies which were
opening upon her horizon. Lord Burghley could hardly be censured--least
of all ridiculed--for the patient and somewhat timid attributes of his
nature: The ineffable ponderings, which might now be ludicrous, on the
part of a minister of the British Empire, with two hundred millions of
subjects and near a hundred millions of revenue, were almost inevitable
in a man guiding a realm of four millions of people with half a million
of income.

It was, on the whole, a strange negotiation, this between England and
Holland. A commonwealth had arisen, but was unconscious of the strength
which it was to find in the principle of states' union, and of religious
equality. It sought, on the contrary, to exchange its federal
sovereignty for provincial dependence, and to imitate, to a certain
extent, the very intolerance by which it had been driven into revolt.
It was not unnatural that the Netherlanders should hate the Roman
Catholic religion, in the name of which they had endured such infinite
tortures, but it is, nevertheless, painful to observe that they requested
Queen Elizabeth, whom they styled defender, not of "the faith" but of the
"reformed religion," to exclude from the Provinces, in case she accepted
the sovereignty, the exercise of all religious rites except those
belonging to the reformed church. They, however, expressly provided
against inquisition into conscience. Private houses were to be sacred,
the, papists free within their own walls, but the churches were to be
closed to those of the ancient faith. This was not so bad as to hang,
burn, drown, and bury alive nonconformists, as had been done by Philip
and the holy inquisition in the name of the church of Rome; nor is it