CRITICAL, HISTORICAL, AND MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS By Lord Macaulay With A Memoir And Index In Six Volumes. Vol. III [Illustration: 0011] New York: Published By Sheldon And Company 1860 ESSAYS. BURLEIGH AND HIS TIMES. (1) (Edinburgh Review, April, 1832.) The {1}work of Dr. Nares has filled us with astonishment similar to that which Captain Lemuel Gulliver felt when he first landed in Brobdingnag, and saw corn as high as the oaks in the New Forest, thimbles as large as buckets, and wrens of the bulk of turkeys. The whole book, and every component part of it, is on a gigantic scale. The title is as long as an ordinary preface: the prefatory matter would furnish out an ordinary book; and the book contains as much reading as an ordinary library. We cannot sum up the merits of the stupendous mass of paper which lies before us better than by saying that it consists of about two thousand closely printed quarto pages, that it occupies fifteen hundred inches cubic measure, and (1) _Memoirs of The Life and Administration of the Right Honourable William Cecil Lord Burghley, Secretary of State in the Reign of King Edward the Sixth, and Lord High Treasurer of England in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth. Containing an Historical Mew of the Times in which he lived, and of the many eminent and illustrious Persons with whom he was connected; with Extracts from his Private and Official Correspondence and other Papers, now first published from the Originals_. By the Reverend Edward Nares, D. D., Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. 3 vols. 4to. London: 1828. 1832. {2}that it weighs sixty pounds avoirdupois. Such a book might, before the deluge, have been considered as light reading by Hilpa and Shalum. But unhappily the life of man is now threescore years and ten; and we cannot but think it somewhat unfair in Dr. Nares to demand from us so large a portion of so short an existence.