Mount" was a fit precursor of the later and more important works of its author, devoted to other and higher subjects. The book has disappeared from notice, and it perhaps hardly deserves reprinting; but it showed the trend of the author's mind, and proved that a future success was at least possible for him.

It is not always profitable to trace, in minute detail, the progress of events in an author's life. He was born; he went to school or academy; he graduated at college, neglecting some studies and excelling in others; he essayed law or divinity, and grew wearied of it; travelled in Europe; married; contributed to the periodical press; occupied some public station; published his first book. Some such story as this could be told of half our American authors in the nineteenth century, and the filling in of details is comparatively unimportant, as a rule. The chief question that arouses our notice is, more properly, that which relates to an author's final adoption of a high literary life-work. John Lothrop Motley is known, the world over, as the great historian of the Netherlands. How came this to pass? Some know him as novelist, others are not aware that he ever wrote a novel. Some deem him a great diplomat, an honor to the nation, sacrificed to the ignorant spite of a president who could not appreciate him; others reply that his disagreement with an administration, and his friendship for Senator Sumner, when the latter was hostile to that administration, made necessary his removal from a confidential relation with the executive. Others,

again, like to, dwell upon his culture, his winsome personal character, his honorable career in the world of thought. Motley, the historian, however, claims our notice now, not Motley, the novelist, essayist, diplomat, man of culture. His life-work forced itself upon him. him. "I had not," he wrote to his friend Mr. William Amory, of Boston, Prescott's brotherin-law, "I had not first made up my mind to write a history, and then cast about to take up a subject. My subject had taken me up, drawn me on, and absorbed me into itself. It was necessary for me, it seemed, to write the book I had been thinking much of, even if it were destined to fall dead from the press, and I had no inclination or interest to write any other. It was not that I cared about writing a history, but that I felt an inevitable impulse to write one particular history." This, clearly, was a noble beginning, and nobly was it followed. Motley's theme was of course closely akin to one upon which Prescott was already working, the " History of Philip the Second"; and the hearty welcome given the younger scholar by Prescott forms one of the pleasantest episodes in the personal experiences of American authorship. "The Rise of the Dutch Republic," thus begun, was written with the historian's painstaking care, after diligent study in the libraries and state-collections of Europe. It forms, in three volumes, the first part of a virtually connected history, of which the later instalments are "The History of the United Netherlands," in four

"

*O. W. Holmes' "Memoir of Motley," 63, 65.

Motley's "History of the Netherlands."

volumes, and “The Life and Death of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland," in two volumes. The reader may separate these works for convenience' sake, but need not, for they are almost a united whole. As interesting as fiction, as eloquent as the best oratory, they are as trustworthy as accuracy and faithful industry could make them. Motley's portraiture of William the Silent is one of the great delineations of history. Not less able, nor less picturesque, is his remarkable account of the character of Queen Elizabeth of England, and of the court and times in which she lived. Writing of the Netherlands, Motley really gives us a military, civil, and social history of Europe in an age of great struggles. He has been accused of partiality and partisanship; but his analysis of the character of William is as just, and where there is need, as pitiless, as that of Philip II. himself. It has been declared that Motley is intensely antiCatholic. Anti-Roman is the proper word; but his anti-Romanism is no more than a denunciation of the bloody horrors of the Inquisition, and of those awful wars in which the extermination of whole Protestant peoples was the perpetual purpose. The hate and cruelty of Calvinist against Romanist, and the hostilities between Calvinist and Lutheran, are laid bare to the eye of all future time. How Protestants persecuted and killed we are very plainly told by this impartial writer. Their crime was as great, in the moral sense, as that of their foes; but it hurried far fewer out of the world of terror and of blood. He who quarrels

with Motley really quarrels with events, not with their recorder. His readers study under the guidance of a masterly political analyst, a writer whose style is vivid and eloquent, and an historian who can both gather facts and winnow truth from falsehood, and show a high appreciation of the spirit of liberty which moved great actions in stirring times. He was impulsive and occasionally haughty, as a man, and also in some of his judgments; but he was loyal to his idea of truth and freedom. "Stirring vitality" is the apt descriptive phrase applied to Motley by his friend and biographer; and it was this, with his intense love of religious and political freedom, which enabled him to give us "the long roll of glowing tapestry he has woven for us, with all its life-like portraits, its almost moving pageants, its sieges where we can see the artillery flashing, its battle-fields with their smoke and fire, pictures which cannot fade, and which will preserve his name interwoven with their own

enduring colors."*

The two greatest historians America has produced-Bancroft and Motley-were great because they were American historians, imbued with the national spirit of liberty.

Eugene Schuyler b. 1840.

Among living American historians and biographers who have selected foreign themes, the name of Eugene Schuyler demands attention, though his future literary career cannot be forecast. His two-volume "Life of Peter the Great"-as truly a history as a biog- the Great.

* Holmes' "Life of Motley," 223, 224.

Schuyler's Life of Peter

raphy is undoubtedly the standard life of the great Russian, even if we take into view the literature of the world. This position it has won by the fulness of its preliminary investigations, pursued during the diplomatic career which almost seems an inevitable element in the work of American historians; and also by the completeness of its plan and the minuteness and accuracy of its details. Its one fault is unfortunate, almost fatal. The book, which ought to have been interesting to the degree of romance, is dull from beginning to end. It is undoubtedly a magnum opus, but it must be read as a task, undertaken with resolution and completed with self-congratulation. Fortunate would Schuyler have been had he caught the charm of Motley's unpretending little essay on Peter, originally prepared as a review article, and long afterwards reprinted in a modest pamphlet.

Ticknor,

This chapter on American historical writers may worthily be closed with a mention of the one great purely literary history thus far produced in the counGeorge try. George Ticknor's "History of Span1791-1871. ish Literature" was the work of a man of broad and deep culture, trained in the best circles of Ticknor's his own country, and the friend and asso"History of ciate of many of the great Europeans of his Literature." day. The history, based upon long studies and patient accumulations of material, is consulted as the best, and, for the time, the ultimate, authority on its interesting theme. The highest tribute paid to its merit is the fact that, in our age of great critical authority, no contemporary scholar has undertaken

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