kingdoms is the final result of the growth of the Burgundian power in the fifteenth century. ♦Its effect on language.♦ And by leading to the separation of the northern Netherlands from the Empire, it has led to one result which could never have been reckoned on, the preservation of one branch of the Low-Dutch tongue as the acknowledged and literary speech of an independent nation. ♦The Netherlands and Belgium.♦ Its political results were the creation, in the shape of the northern Netherlands, of a power which once held a great place in the affairs of Europe and of the world, and the slower growth, in the shape of the southern Netherlands, of a state in which modern European policy still acknowledges the character of a middle kingdom. As the neutral confederation of Switzerland represents the middle kingdom of Burgundy, so the neutral kingdom of Belgium represents the middle kingdom of Lotharingia. ♦Ducal Burgundy a fief of the Western Kingdom.♦ The Duchy of Burgundy which gave its name to the Burgundian power of the fifteenth century was that one among the many lands bearing the Burgundian name which lay wholly outside the Burgundian kingdom of the Emperors. This Burgundy, the only one which has kept the name to our own time, the duchy of which Dijon is the capital, never was a fief of the Eastern Kingdom or of the Empire, after the final separation. It always acknowledged the supremacy of the kings of Laon and Paris. ♦Two lines of Dukes. 1032.♦ By these last the duchy was twice granted in fief to princes of their own house, once in the eleventh century and once in the fourteenth. ♦The Valois. 1363.♦ This last grant was the beginning of the Dukes of the House of Valois, with the growth of whose power we have now to deal. ♦Union of Flanders and Burgundy. 1369. | The county of Burgundy.♦ Philip the Hardy, the first Duke of this line, obtained, by his marriage with Margaret of Flanders, the counties of _Flanders_, _Artois_, _Rhetel_, and _Nevers_, all fiefs of the crown of France, together with the _County Palatine of Burgundy_ as a fief of the Empire. The peculiar position of the Dukes of Burgundy of this line was at once established by this marriage. ♦Two masses of territory.♦ Duke Philip held of two lords, and his dominions lay in two distinct masses. The two Burgundies, duchy and county, and the county of Nevers, lay geographically together; Flanders and Artois lay together at a great distance; the small possession of Rhetel lay again detached between the two. Any princes who held such a territory as this could hardly fail to devote their main policy to the work of bringing about the geographical union of their scattered possessions. Nor was this all. The possession of the two Burgundies made their common sovereign a vassal at once of France and of the Empire. ♦Position of the Netherlands.♦ The possession of Flanders, Artois, and Rhetel further brought him into connexion with those border