Calvin was born in Picardy in 1509,--the year that Henry VIII. ascended the British throne, and the year that Luther began to preach at Wittenberg. He was not a peasant's son, like Luther, but belonged to what the world calls a good family. Intellectually he was precocious, and received an excellent education at a college in Paris, being destined for the law by his father, who sent him to the University of Orleans and then to Bourges, where he studied under eminent jurists, and made the acquaintance of many distinguished men. His conversion took place about the year 1529, when he was twenty; and this gave a new direction to his studies and his life. He was a pale-faced young man, with sparkling eyes, sedate and earnest beyond his years. He was twenty-three when he published the books of Seneca on Clemency, with learned commentaries. At the age of twenty-three he was in communion with the reformers of Germany, and was acknowledged to be, even at that early age, the head of the reform party in France. In 1533 he went to Paris, then as always the centre of the national life, where the new ideas were creating great commotion in scholarly and ecclesiastical circles, and even in the court itself. Giving offence to the doctors of the Sorbonne for his evangelical views as to Justification, he was obliged to seek refuge with the Queen of Navarre, whose castle at Pau was the resort of persecuted reformers. After leading rather a fugitive life in different parts of France, he retreated to Switzerland, and at twenty-six published his celebrated "Institutes," which he dedicated to Francis I., hoping to convert him to the Protestant faith. After a short residence in Italy, at the court of the Duchess of Ferrara, he took up his abode at Geneva, and his great career began. Geneva, a city of the Allobroges in the time of Caesar, possessed at this time about twenty thousand inhabitants, and was a free state, having a constitution somewhat like that of Florence when it was under the control of Savonarola. It had rebelled against the Duke of Savoy, who seems to have been in the fifteenth century its patron ruler. The government of this little Savoyard state became substantially like that which existed among the Swiss cantons. The supreme power resided in the council of Two Hundred, which alone had the power to make or abolish laws. There was a lesser council of Sixty, for diplomatic objects only.