adopted in Burrow's first book. He later made use of his unrivaled knowledge of the Whig and Burkean component within English liberalism in his Carlyle Lectures at Oxford, the results appearing as Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (1988). Sussex was the first university in Britain to offer an undergraduate degree in intellectual history, and Burrow became the first to occupy the chair in this branch of history created for him in 1981, the year in which his book A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past, appeared and was awarded the Wolfson History Prize. To this elegant study of the monumental works of Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, William Stubbs, Edward Augustus Freeman and James Anthony Froude he later added an incisive short book on Edward Gibbon (1985). Burrow's 1981 book won the Wolfson History Prize. In that work he proposed that the 19th-century historians William Stubbs, John Richard Green, and Edward Augustus Freeman were historical scholars with little or no experience of public affairs, with views of the present which were romantically historicised, and who were drawn to history by an antiquarian passion for the past and by a patriotic and populist impulse to identify the nation and its institutions as the collective subject of English history, making "the new historiography of early medieval times an extension, filling out and democratising, of older Whig notions of continuity. It was Stubbs who presented this most substantially; Green who made it popular and dramatic ... It is in Freeman ... of the three the most purely a narrative historian, that the strains are most apparent." In the same work Burrow remarked of another nineteenth-century historian, James Anthony Froude, that he was a leading promoter of the imperialist excitement of the closing years of the century, but that in the mass of his work even empire took second place to religion. In another chapter, under the title The German inheritance: a people and its institutions, Burrow referred to the earlier historian Edward Gibbon, who had been writing in the reign of the Hanoverian monarch George III of the United Kingdom at the time of the American Revolutionary War. Burrow mentioned that, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon, as if affecting a superiority to patriotic prejudice and at the same time affirming its existence in his own time, had