On that fatal fifth of January, Charles of Burgundy had only just passed middle life. He was forty-four years, one month, and twenty-six days old, an age when a man has the right to look forward to new achievements. Every circumstance of the dreary and premature death was in glaring contrast to his prospects at his birth in 1433, in insolent contradiction to his own estimation of the obligations assumed by Fate in his behalf. In certain details of the catastrophe there are, of course, accidents. No one could have predicted that the duke whose chief title was a synonym for magnificence, that this cherished heir to his House, who had been bathed in all the luxury known to his epoch, should have thus lain in death, many hours long, unattended and uncared-for, naked and frozen on a bed of congealed mud, with a winter sky as canopy. The actual adversity as it overwhelmed him was too appalling for any foresight. But the great dream of the man's life that vanished with his vitality owed its annihilation to no mere chance of warfare. Had it not been rudely ended by the battle of Nancy, other means of destruction, inevitable and sure, would have appeared. The projected erection of a solidified kingdom stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland and possibly to the Mediterranean, one that could hold the balance of power between France and Germany, contained elements of disintegration, latent at its foundation. It is clear, from a consideration of the Duke of Burgundy and his position in the Europe of his time, that the materials which he expected to mould into a realm were a collection of sentient units. Each separate one was instinct with individual life, individual desires, conscious of its own minute past, capable of directing its own contracted future. That the hereditary title of overlord to each political unity had lodged upon a head already dignified by a plurality of similar titles, was a mere chance and viewed by the burghers in a wholly different light from that in which this same overlord regarded it. The fishers in Holland, the manufacturers in Brabant, the merchants in Flanders, the vintners in Burgundy, cared nothing for being the wings of an imperial idea. They wanted safe fishing grounds, unmolested highways of commerce, vineyards free from the tramp of armies. And with their desires fixed on these as needful, their attitude towards the political centralisation planned by their common ruler, often betrayed both ignorance and inconsistency. At various epochs some degree of imperialism for the Netherland group had been quite to popular taste. In Holland, Zealand and Hainaut, it had been conceded that Jacqueline of Bavaria was less efficient to maintain desirable conditions than her cousin of Burgundy, and the exchange of sovereigns had been effected in spite of the manifest injustice involved in the transaction. But while there was willingness to accept any advantages that might accrue to a people from the reputation of a local overlord,