"Ferdinand

After ten years of preparation and ten more spent in composing, he completed his first undertaking at the age of forty. He had an immediate reward in the and Isabella." enthusiastic reception that was given it. The long and laborious years had not been passed in vain. Readers dropped their novels to follow the more interesting details of Spanish adventure in a period full of romance. The different kingdoms of Spain had been united under one monarchy, which was now devising vast enterprises of discovery and conquest in a hemisphere whose existence had been unsuspected before the voyage of Columbus. The establishment of the Inquisition, the invasion by the Moors, the war of Granada and the Italian wars, the treatment of Columbus, the Spanish colonial policy, the character of the sovereigns, the administration of Cardinal Ximenes, are topics which were treated in a style corresponding to their interest. It was an age of barbaric splendor, of chivalric deeds, and daring enterprises. Such themes could not be treated coldly, however exactly and truthfully. They were inspiring to the imagination. Consequently the account of them by a writer who had given much attention to style is most graphic. It caught the color of the events described and of the deeds recounted. The glint of armor is in it, the crimson and gold of flaunting banners, and the movement of advancing hosts.

The interest of the historian himself naturally culminated in the characters of the two personages who most commended themselves to his sense of justice and nobility, Queen Isabella and Columbus. How he regarded the first may be seen from portions of the chapter which reviews her life.

"Her person was of the middle height, and well proportioned. She had a clear, fresh complexion, with light blue eyes and auburn hair, a style of beauty exceedingly rare in Spain. Her features were regular, and universally allowed to be uncommonly handsome. Her manners were gracious and pleasing. They were marked by natural dignity and modest reserve, tempered by an affability which flowed from the kindliness of her disposition. The respect which she imposed was mingled with the strongest feelings of devotion and love. By her condescending and captivating deportment, as well as by her higher qualities, she gained an ascendency over her turbulent subjects which no king of Spain could ever boast.

She was temperate and frugal, simple and economical, of a sedate though cheerful temper, with little taste for the frivolous amusements which make up so much of a court life.

Among her moral qualities the most conspicuous, perhaps, was her magnanimity. Her schemes were vast, and executed in the same noble spirit in which they were conceived and with the most direct and open policy. She seconded Columbus in the prosecution of his arduous enterprise and shielded him from the calumny of his enemies.

But the principle which gave a peculiar coloring to every feature of Isabella's mind was piety. It shone forth from the very depths of her soul with a heavenly radiance which illuminated her whole character.

Though blemishes of the deepest dye are on her administration, they certainly are not to be regarded as such on her moral character. It was not to be expected that a solitary woman, filled with natural diffidence of her own capacity in such subjects, should array herself against those venerated counsellors whom she had been taught from her cradle to look to as the guides and guardians of her conscience."

This and much more is followed by a discriminating comparison of Isabella with Elizabeth of England, the two sovereigns of the chief kingdoms of Europe in an age of vast enterprise and ambition.

The demand for this new example of historical writing was a surprise to the author and all concerned. Copies could not be furnished as fast as they were called for. In a few months more were sold than it was expected could be disposed of in five years. No such success had been reached by dignified work in this country.

Other Works.

A similar welcome was given to the "Conquest of Mexico" six years later. In four months the first edition of five thousand copies was exhausted. Moreover, one hundred and thirty critics had sent the author their approval in as many newspapers. Nothing further could be asked of his countrymen. From England the same testimony came in elaborate reviews by such scholars as Charles Philips and Dean Milman. Tributes to the "Conquest of Peru" were in the same vein two years afterward, and the demand for it as great as for his two previous works and at the rate of one thousand copies a month. The "Reign of Philip II." was unfinished at his death in 1859. But he needed nothing to give him a more assured place in the world of letters. This was recognized abroad as well as at home, and is now as it was in his lifetime. Under difficulties which none have contended with who have undertaken a task of such magnitude - not even Milton and Thierry Prescott accomplished a work that would have. been more than creditable to an investigator with good eyesight. Without this he demonstrated the possibilities of a reflective mind and the inner vision, and the superiority of a high purpose and noble character to bodily infirmity. He furnished another example of the heroic in literature.

XXXII

MOTLEY AND PARKMAN

SPAIN was a subject of engrossing interest to our earlier historians. Irving wrote of Granada, the Alhambra, and the voyages which Columbus made under royal auspices. Prescott composed three elaborate works about the occupation of Central American domains by Spanish invaders. Then Motley followed with his accounts of the struggle against the aggressions of Spain in the Low Countries. In all these histories a view is given of what was once a mighty power in Europe and America, which contrasts strangely with the estimate of it produced by its subsequent decline.

John Lothrop Motley, like Hildreth and Bancroft and Prescott, was a Massachusetts boy, born in Dorchester in 1814 and graduated from Harvard in 1831. Motley's After two years' study in Germany he read Early Efforts. law, as several men of letters had before him, while making up his mind with regard to the branch of literature he would choose for a profession. A semi-biographical novel entitled "Morton's Hope" did not encourage him or his friends to believe that fiction was his forte. Neither did the later" Merry Mount, a Romance of the Massachusetts Colony," reverse the first reverse the first judgment, although the descriptive passages gave promise of something better in after years. Between the two stories he had published a fifty-page article in the "North American Review" on Peter the Great, which was prophetic of his true

vocation as a writer of history and biography. Whereupon his friends, who had withheld their commendation of his romances, urged him to undertake something large in the historical line. It is probable that he needed little urging, since he had already begun the study of events and principles, also of fiction, for their picturesque setting. Out of the last came a critical essay upon Balzac, followed by another on the "Polity of the Puritans," broad and charitable, as might be expected from the author's antecedents.

Meantime his choice of a great historical theme had fallen upon the "Rise of the Dutch Republic." It was an The “Dutch inspiring study, from remote ages when barRepublic." barian tribes inhabiting low morasses by the sea sent the Batavian legion to be the bodyguard of Roman emperors down to the times of Charles Martel and Charlemagne and of the dukes of Burgundy, when the Netherlands became the richest and most populous part of Europe. And afterward, when the daughter of Charles the Bold took the title to the Austrian Maximilian, her husband, and when their grandson resigned it to Philip II. of Spain in 1555, the same opulence and splendor went with the transmitted inheritance. So also did a growing Protestantism, an element not agreeable to the last inheritor, who straightway undertook to uproot the new Reformation doctrines, and to restore the Roman Catholic supremacy by the tyranny of Alva, which eventually united the provinces in a republic whose naval power became the foremost in the world, ultimately compelling Spain to acknowledge its independence, and laying the foundation of a colonial system which is still a factor in European politics.