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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4727 ***
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of the Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, v3
+by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
+#13 in our series by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
+
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+
+JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.
+
+A MEMOIR
+
+By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
+
+
+Volume III.
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+1874.  AEt.  60.
+
+"LIFE OF JOHN OF BARNEVELD."--CRITICISMS.--GROEN VAN PRINSTERER.
+
+The full title of Mr. Motley's next and last work is "The Life and Death
+of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland; with a View of the Primary
+Causes and Movements of the Thirty Years' War."
+
+In point of fact this work is a history rather than a biography.  It is
+an interlude, a pause between the acts which were to fill out the
+complete plan of the "Eighty Years' Tragedy," and of which the last act,
+the Thirty Years' War, remains unwritten.  The "Life of Barneveld" was
+received as a fitting and worthy continuation of the series of
+intellectual labor in which he was engaged.  I will quote but two general
+expressions of approval from the two best known British critical reviews.
+In connection with his previous works, it forms, says "The London
+Quarterly," "a fine and continuous story, of which the writer and the
+nation celebrated by him have equal reason to be proud; a narrative which
+will remain a prominent ornament of American genius, while it has
+permanently enriched English literature on this as well as on the other
+side of the Atlantic."
+
+"The Edinburgh Review" speaks no less warmly: "We can hardly give too
+much appreciation to that subtile alchemy of the brain which has enabled
+him to produce out of dull, crabbed, and often illegible state papers,
+the vivid, graphic, and sparkling narrative which he has given to the
+world."
+
+In a literary point of view, M. Groen van Prinsterer, whose elaborate
+work has been already referred to, speaks of it as perhaps the most
+classical of Motley's productions, but it is upon this work that the
+force of his own and other Dutch criticisms has been chiefly expended.
+
+The key to this biographical history or historical biography may be found
+in a few sentences from its opening chapter.
+
+     "There have been few men at any period whose lives have been more
+     closely identical than his [Barneveld's] with a national history.
+     There have been few great men in any history whose names have become
+     less familiar to the world, and lived less in the mouths of
+     posterity.  Yet there can be no doubt that if William the Silent was
+     the founder of the independence of the United Provinces, Barneveld
+     was the founder of the Commonwealth itself.  .  .  .
+
+     "Had that country of which he was so long the first citizen
+     maintained until our own day the same proportional position among
+     the empires of Christendom as it held in the seventeenth century,
+     the name of John of Barneveld would have perhaps been as familiar to
+     all men as it is at this moment to nearly every inhabitant of the
+     Netherlands.  Even now political passion is almost as ready to flame
+     forth, either in ardent affection or enthusiastic hatred, as if two
+     centuries and a half had not elapsed since his death.  His name is
+     so typical of a party, a polity, and a faith, so indelibly
+     associated with a great historical cataclysm, as to render it
+     difficult even for the grave, the conscientious, the learned, the
+     patriotic, of his own compatriots to speak of him with absolute
+     impartiality.
+
+     "A foreigner who loves and admires all that is great and noble in
+     the history of that famous republic, and can have no hereditary bias
+     as to its ecclesiastical or political theories, may at least attempt
+     the task with comparative coldness, although conscious of inability
+     to do thorough justice to a most complex subject."
+
+With all Mr. Motley's efforts to be impartial, to which even his sternest
+critics bear witness, he could not help becoming a partisan of the cause
+which for him was that of religious liberty and progress, as against the
+accepted formula of an old ecclesiastical organization.  For the quarrel
+which came near being a civil war, which convulsed the state, and cost
+Barneveld his head, had its origin in a difference on certain points, and
+more especially on a single point, of religious doctrine.
+
+As a great river may be traced back until its fountainhead is found in a
+thread of water streaming from a cleft in the rocks, so a great national
+movement may sometimes be followed until its starting-point is found in
+the cell of a monk or the studies of a pair of wrangling professors.
+
+The religious quarrel of the Dutchmen in the seventeenth century reminds
+us in some points of the strife between two parties in our own New
+England, sometimes arraying the "church" on one side against the
+"parish," or the general body of worshippers, on the other.  The
+portraits of Gomarus, the great orthodox champion, and Arminius, the head
+and front of the "liberal theology" of his day, as given in the little
+old quarto of Meursius, recall two ministerial types of countenance
+familiar to those who remember the earlier years of our century.
+
+Under the name of "Remonstrants" and "Contra-Remonstrants,"--Arminians
+and old-fashioned Calvinists, as we should say,--the adherents of the two
+Leyden professors disputed the right to the possession of the churches,
+and the claim to be considered as representing the national religion.  Of
+the seven United Provinces, two, Holland and Utrecht, were prevailingly
+Arminian, and the other five Calvinistic.  Barneveld, who, under the
+title of Advocate, represented the province of Holland, the most
+important of them all, claimed for each province a right to determine its
+own state religion.  Maurice the Stadholder, son of William the Silent,
+the military chief of the republic, claimed the right for the States-
+General.  'Cujus regio ejus religio' was then the accepted public
+doctrine of Protestant nations.  Thus the provincial and the general
+governments were brought into conflict by their creeds, and the question
+whether the republic was a confederation or a nation, the same question
+which has been practically raised, and for the time at least settled, in
+our own republic, was in some way to be decided.  After various
+disturbances and acts of violence by both parties, Maurice, representing
+the States-General, pronounced for the Calvinists or Contra-Remonstrants,
+and took possession of one of the great churches, as an assertion of his
+authority.  Barneveld, representing the Arminian or Remonstrant
+provinces, levied a body of mercenary soldiers in several of the cities.
+These were disbanded by Maurice, and afterwards by an act of the States-
+General.  Barneveld was apprehended, imprisoned, and executed, after an
+examination which was in no proper sense a trial.  Grotius, who was on
+the Arminian side and involved in the inculpated proceedings, was also
+arrested and imprisoned.  His escape, by a stratagem successfully
+repeated by a slave in our own times, may challenge comparison for its
+romantic interest with any chapter of fiction.  How his wife packed him
+into the chest supposed to contain the folios of the great oriental
+scholar Erpenius, how the soldiers wondered at its weight and questioned
+whether it did not hold an Arminian, how the servant-maid, Elsje van
+Houwening, quick-witted as Morgiana of the "Forty Thieves," parried their
+questions and convoyed her master safely to the friendly place of
+refuge,--all this must be read in the vivid narrative of the author.
+
+The questions involved were political, local, personal, and above all
+religious.  Here is the picture which Motley draws of the religious
+quarrel as it divided the people:--
+
+     "In burghers' mansions, peasants' cottages, mechanics' back-parlors;
+     on board herring-smacks, canal-boats, and East Indiamen; in shops,
+     counting-rooms, farm-yards, guard-rooms, alehouses; on the exchange,
+     in the tennis court, on the mall; at banquets, at burials,
+     christenings, or bridals; wherever and whenever human creatures met
+     each other, there was ever to be found the fierce wrangle of
+     Remonstrant and Contra-Remonstrant, the hissing of red-hot
+     theological rhetoric, the pelting of hostile texts.  The
+     blacksmith's iron cooled on the anvil, the tinker dropped a kettle
+     half mended, the broker left a bargain unclinched, the Scheveningen
+     fisherman in his wooden shoes forgot the cracks in his pinkie, while
+     each paused to hold high converse with friend or foe on fate, free-
+     will, or absolute foreknowledge; losing himself in wandering mazes
+     whence there was no issue.  Province against province, city against
+     city, family against family; it was one vast scene of bickering,
+     denunciation, heart-burnings, mutual excommunication and hatred."
+
+The religious grounds of the quarrel which set these seventeenth-century
+Dutchmen to cutting each other's throats were to be looked for in the
+"Five Points" of the Arminians as arrayed against the "Seven Points" of
+the Gomarites, or Contra-Remonstrants.  The most important of the
+differences which were to be settled by fratricide seem to have been
+these:--
+
+According to the Five Points, "God has from eternity resolved to choose
+to eternal life those who through his grace believe in Jesus Christ,"
+etc.  According to the Seven Points, "God in his election has not looked
+at the belief and the repentance of the elect," etc.  According to the
+Five Points, all good deeds must be ascribed to God's grace in Christ,
+but it does not work irresistibly.  The language of the Seven Points
+implies that the elect cannot resist God's eternal and unchangeable
+design to give them faith and steadfastness, and that they can never
+wholly and for always lose the true faith.  The language of the Five
+Points is unsettled as to the last proposition, but it was afterwards
+maintained by the Remonstrant party that a true believer could, through
+his own fault, fall away from God and lose faith.
+
+It must be remembered that these religious questions had an immediate
+connection with politics.  Independently of the conflict of jurisdiction,
+in which they involved the parties to the two different creeds, it was
+believed or pretended that the new doctrines of the Remonstrants led
+towards Romanism, and were allied with designs which threatened the
+independence of the country.  "There are two factions in the land," said
+Maurice, "that of Orange and that of Spain, and the two chiefs of the
+Spanish faction are those political and priestly Arminians, Uytenbogaert
+and Oldenbarneveld."
+
+The heads of the two religious and political parties were in such
+hereditary, long-continued, and intimate relations up to the time when
+one signed the other's death-warrant, that it was impossible to write the
+life of one without also writing that of the other.  For his biographer
+John of Barneveld is the true patriot, the martyr, whose cause was that
+of religious and political freedom.  For him Maurice is the ambitious
+soldier who hated his political rival, and never rested until this rival
+was brought to the scaffold.
+
+The questions which agitated men's minds two centuries and a half ago
+are not dead yet in the country where they produced such estrangement,
+violence, and wrong.  No stranger could take them up without encountering
+hostile criticism from one party or the other.  It may be and has been
+conceded that Mr. Motley writes as a partisan,--a partisan of freedom in
+politics and religion, as he understands freedom.  This secures him the
+antagonism of one class of critics.  But these critics are themselves
+partisans, and themselves open to the cross-fire of their antagonists.
+M. Groen van Prinsterer, "the learned and distinguished" editor of the
+"Archives et Correspondance" of the Orange and Nassau family, published a
+considerable volume, before referred to, in which many of Motley's views
+are strongly controverted.  But he himself is far from being in accord
+with "that eminent scholar," M. Bakhuyzen van den Brink, whose name, he
+says, is celebrated enough to need no comment, or with M. Fruin, of whose
+impartiality and erudition he himself speaks in the strongest terms.  The
+ground upon which he is attacked is thus stated in his own words:--
+
+"People have often pretended to find in my writings the deplorable
+influence of an extreme Calvinism.  The Puritans of the seventeenth
+century are my fellow-religionists.  I am a sectarian and not an
+historian."
+
+It is plain enough to any impartial reader that there are at least
+plausible grounds for this accusation against Mr. Motley's critic.  And
+on a careful examination of the formidable volume, it becomes obvious
+that Mr. Motley has presented a view of the events and the personages of
+the stormy epoch with which he is dealing, which leaves a battle-ground
+yet to be fought over by those who come after him.  The dispute is not
+and cannot be settled.
+
+The end of all religious discussion has come when one of the parties
+claims that it is thinking or acting under immediate Divine guidance.
+"It is God's affair, and his honor is touched," says William Lewis to
+Prince Maurice.  Mr. Motley's critic is not less confident in claiming
+the Almighty as on the side of his own views.  Let him state his own
+ground of departure:--
+
+     "To show the difference, let me rather say the contrast, between the
+     point of view of Mr. Motley and my own, between the Unitarian and
+     the Evangelical belief.  I am issue of CALVIN, child of the
+     Awakening (reveil).  Faithful to the device of the Reformers:
+     Justification by faith alone, and the Word of God endures eternally.
+     I consider history from the point of view of Merle d'Aubigne,
+     Chalmers, Guizot.  I desire to be disciple and witness of our Lord
+     and Saviour, Jesus Christ."
+
+He is therefore of necessity antagonistic to a writer whom he describes
+in such words as these:--
+
+     "Mr. Motley is liberal and rationalist.
+
+     "He becomes, in attacking the principle of the Reformation, the
+     passionate opponent of the Puritans and of Maurice, the ardent
+     apologist of Barnevelt and the Arminians.
+
+     "It is understood, and he makes no mystery of it, that he inclines
+     towards the vague and undecided doctrine of the Unitarians."
+
+What M. Groen's idea of Unitarians is may be gathered from the statement
+about them which he gets from a letter of De Tocqueville.
+
+     "They are pure deists; they talk about the Bible, because they do
+     not wish to shock too severely public opinion, which is prevailingly
+     Christian.  They have a service on Sundays; I have been there.  At
+     it they read verses from Dryden or other English poets on the
+     existence of God and the immortality of the soul.  They deliver a
+     discourse on some point of morality, and all is said."
+
+In point of fact the wave of protest which stormed the dikes of Dutch
+orthodoxy in the seventeenth century stole gently through the bars of New
+England Puritanism in the eighteenth.
+
+"Though the large number," says Mr. Bancroft, "still acknowledged the
+fixedness of the divine decrees, and the resistless certainty from all
+eternity of election and of reprobation, there were not wanting, even
+among the clergy, some who had modified the sternness of the ancient
+doctrine by making the self-direction of the active powers of man with
+freedom of inquiry and private judgment the central idea of a protest
+against Calvinism."
+
+Protestantism, cut loose from an infallible church, and drifting with
+currents it cannot resist, wakes up once or oftener in every century, to
+find itself in a new locality.  Then it rubs its eyes and wonders whether
+it has found its harbor or only lost its anchor.  There is no end to its
+disputes, for it has nothing but a fallible vote as authority for its
+oracles, and these appeal only to fallible interpreters.
+
+It is as hard to contend in argument against "the oligarchy of heaven,"
+as Motley calls the Calvinistic party, as it was formerly to strive with
+them in arms.
+
+To this "aristocracy of God's elect" belonged the party which framed the
+declaration of the Synod of Dort; the party which under the forms of
+justice shed the blood of the great statesman who had served his country
+so long and so well.  To this chosen body belonged the late venerable and
+truly excellent as well as learned M. Groen van Prinsterer, and he
+exercised the usual right of examining in the light of his privileged
+position the views of a "liberal" and "rationalist" writer who goes to
+meeting on Sunday to hear verses from Dryden.  This does not diminish his
+claim for a fair reading of the "intimate correspondence," which he
+considers Mr. Motley has not duly taken into account, and of the other
+letters to be found printed in his somewhat disjointed and fragmentary
+volume.
+
+This "intimate correspondence" shows Maurice the Stadholder indifferent
+and lax in internal administration and as being constantly advised and
+urged by his relative Count William of Nassau.  This need of constant
+urging extends to religious as well as other matters, and is inconsistent
+with M. Groen van Prinsterer's assertion that the question was for
+Maurice above all religious, and for Barneveld above all political.
+Whether its negative evidence can be considered as neutralizing that
+which is adduced by Mr. Motley to show the Stadholder's hatred of the
+Advocate may be left to the reader who has just risen from the account of
+the mock trial and the swift execution of the great and venerable
+statesman.  The formal entry on the record upon the day of his "judicial
+murder" is singularly solemn and impressive:--
+
+     "Monday, 13th May, 1619.  To-day was executed with the sword here in
+     the Hague, on a scaffold thereto erected in the Binnenhof before the
+     steps of the great hall, Mr. John of Barneveld, in his life Knight,
+     Lord of Berkel, Rodenrys, etc., Advocate of Holland and West
+     Friesland, for reasons expressed in the sentence and otherwise, with
+     confiscation of his property, after he had served the state thirty-
+     three years two months and five days, since 8th March, 1586; a man
+     of great activity, business, memory, and wisdom,--yea, extraordinary
+     in every respect.  He that stands let him see that he does not
+     fall."
+
+Maurice gave an account of the execution of Barneveld to Count William
+Lewis on the same day in a note "painfully brief and dry."
+
+
+Most authors write their own biography consciously or unconsciously.  We
+have seen Mr. Motley portraying much of himself, his course of life and
+his future, as he would have had it, in his first story.  In this, his
+last work, it is impossible not to read much of his own external and
+internal personal history told under other names and with different
+accessories.  The parallelism often accidentally or intentionally passes
+into divergence.  He would not have had it too close if he could, but
+there are various passages in which it is plain enough that he is telling
+his own story.
+
+Mr. Motley was a diplomatist, and he writes of other diplomatists, and
+one in particular, with most significant detail.  It need not be supposed
+that he intends the "arch intriguer" Aerssens to stand for himself, or
+that he would have endured being thought to identify himself with the man
+of whose "almost devilish acts" he speaks so freely.  But the sagacious
+reader--and he need not be very sharp-sighted--will very certainly see
+something more than a mere historical significance in some of the
+passages which I shall cite for him to reflect upon.  Mr. Motley's
+standard of an ambassador's accomplishments may be judged from the
+following passage:--
+
+     "That those ministers [those of the Republic] were second to the
+     representatives of no other European state in capacity and
+     accomplishment was a fact well known to all who had dealings with
+     them, for the states required in their diplomatic representatives
+     knowledge of history and international law, modern languages, and
+     the classics, as well as familiarity with political customs and
+     social courtesies; the breeding of gentlemen, in short, and the
+     accomplishments of scholars."
+
+The story of the troubles of Aerssens, the ambassador of the United
+Provinces at Paris, must be given at some length, and will repay careful
+reading.
+
+     "Francis Aerssens .  .  .  continued to be the Dutch ambassador
+     after the murder of Henry IV.  .  .  .  He was beyond doubt one of
+     the ablest diplomatists in Europe.  Versed in many languages, a
+     classical student, familiar with history and international law, a
+     man of the world and familiar with its usages, accustomed to
+     associate with dignity and tact on friendliest terms with
+     sovereigns, eminent statesmen, and men of letters; endowed with a
+     facile tongue, a fluent pen, and an eye and ear of singular
+     acuteness and delicacy; distinguished for unflagging industry and
+     singular aptitude for secret and intricate affairs;--he had by the
+     exercise of these various qualities during a period of nearly twenty
+     years at the court of Henry the Great been able to render
+     inestimable services to the Republic which he represented.
+
+     "He had enjoyed the intimacy and even the confidence of Henry IV.,
+     so far as any man could be said to possess that monarch's
+     confidence, and his friendly relations and familiar access to the
+     king gave him political advantages superior to those of any of his
+     colleagues at the same court.
+
+     "Acting entirely and faithfully according to the instructions of the
+     Advocate of Holland, he always gratefully and copiously acknowledged
+     the privilege of being guided and sustained in the difficult paths
+     he had to traverse by so powerful and active an intellect.  I have
+     seldom alluded in terms to the instructions and dispatches of the
+     chief, but every position, negotiation, and opinion of the envoy--
+     and the reader has seen many of them is pervaded by their spirit.
+
+     "It had become a question whether he was to remain at his post or
+     return.  It was doubtful whether he wished to be relieved of his
+     embassy or not.  The States of Holland voted 'to leave it to his
+     candid opinion if in his free conscience he thinks he can serve the
+     public any longer.  If yes, he may keep his office one year more.
+     If no, he may take leave and come home.'
+
+     "Surely the States, under the guidance of the Advocate, had thus
+     acted with consummate courtesy towards a diplomatist whose position,
+     from no apparent fault of his own, but by the force of
+     circumstances,--and rather to his credit than otherwise,--
+     was gravely compromised."
+
+The Queen, Mary de' Medici, had a talk with him, got angry, "became very
+red in the face," and wanted to be rid of him.
+
+     "Nor was the envoy at first desirous of remaining.  .  .  .
+     Nevertheless, he yielded reluctantly to Barneveld's request that he
+     should, for the time at least, remain at his post.  Later on, as the
+     intrigues against him began to unfold themselves, and his faithful
+     services were made use of at home to blacken his character and
+     procure his removal, he refused to resign, as to do so would be to
+     play into the hands of his enemies, and, by inference at least, to
+     accuse himself of infidelity to his trust.  .  .  .
+
+     "It is no wonder that the ambassador was galled to the quick by the
+     outrage which those concerned in the government were seeking to put
+     upon him.  How could an honest man fail to be overwhelmed with rage
+     and anguish at being dishonored before the world by his masters for
+     scrupulously doing his duty, and for maintaining the rights and
+     dignity of his own country?  He knew that the charges were but
+     pretexts, that the motives of his enemies were as base as the
+     intrigues themselves, but he also knew that the world usually sides
+     with the government against the individual, and that a man's
+     reputation is rarely strong enough to maintain itself unsullied in a
+     foreign land when his own government stretches forth its hand, not
+     to shield, but to stab him.  .  .  .
+
+     "'I know,' he said, that this plot has been woven partly here in
+     Holland and partly here by good correspondence in order to drive me
+     from my post.
+
+     "'But as I have discovered this accurately, I have resolved to offer
+     to my masters the continuance of my very humble service for such
+     time and under such conditions as they may think good to prescribe.
+     I prefer forcing my natural and private inclinations to giving an
+     opportunity for the ministers of this kingdom to discredit us, and
+     to my enemies to succeed in injuring me, and by fraud and malice to
+     force me from my post.  .  .  .  I am truly sorry, being ready to
+     retire, wishing to have an honorable testimony in recompense of my
+     labors, that one is in such hurry to take advantage of my fall.  .
+     .  .  What envoy will ever dare to speak with vigor if he is not
+     sustained by the government at home?  .  .  .  My enemies have
+     misrepresented my actions, and my language as passionate,
+     exaggerated, mischievous, but I have no passion except for the
+     service of my superiors.'
+
+     "Barneveld, from well-considered motives of public policy, was
+     favoring his honorable recall.  But he allowed a decorous interval
+     of more than three years to elapse in which to terminate his
+     affairs, and to take a deliberate departure from that French embassy
+     to which the Advocate had originally promoted him, and in which
+     there had been so many years of mutual benefit and confidence
+     between the two statesmen.  He used no underhand means.  He did not
+     abuse the power of the States-General which he wielded to cast him
+     suddenly and brutally from the distinguished post which he occupied,
+     and so to attempt to dishonor him before the world.  Nothing could
+     be more respectful and conciliatory than the attitude of the
+     government from first to last towards this distinguished
+     functionary.  The Republic respected itself too much to deal with
+     honorable agents whose services it felt obliged to dispense with as
+     with vulgar malefactors who had been detected in crime.  .  .  .
+
+     "This work aims at being a political study.  I would attempt to
+     exemplify the influence of individual humors and passions--some of
+     them among the highest, and others certainly the basest that agitate
+     humanity--upon the march of great events, upon general historical
+     results at certain epochs, and upon the destiny of eminent
+     personages."
+
+Here are two suggestive portraits:--
+
+     "The Advocate, while acting only in the name of a slender
+     confederacy, was in truth, so long as he held his place, the prime
+     minister of European Protestantism.  There was none other to rival
+     him, few to comprehend him, fewer still to sustain him.  As Prince
+     Maurice was at that time the great soldier of Protestantism, without
+     clearly scanning the grandeur of the field in which he was a chief
+     actor, or foreseeing the vastness of its future, so the Advocate was
+     its statesman and its prophet.  Could the two have worked together
+     as harmoniously as they had done at an earlier day, it would have
+     been a blessing for the common weal of Europe.  But, alas!  the evil
+     genius of jealousy, which so often forbids cordial relations between
+     soldier and statesman, already stood shrouded in the distance,
+     darkly menacing the strenuous patriot, who was wearing his life out
+     in exertions for what he deemed the true cause of progress and
+     humanity.  .  .  .
+
+     "All history shows that the brilliant soldier of a republic is apt
+     to have the advantage, in a struggle for popular affection and
+     popular applause, over the statesman, however consummate.  .  .  .
+     The great battles and sieges of the prince had been on a world's
+     theatre, had enchained the attention of Christendom, and on their
+     issue had frequently depended, or seemed to depend, the very
+     existence of the nation.  The labors of the statesman, on the
+     contrary, had been comparatively secret.  His noble orations and
+     arguments had been spoken with closed doors to assemblies of
+     colleagues, rather envoys than senators, .  .  while his vast labors
+     in directing both the internal administration and especially the
+     foreign affairs of the commonwealth had been by their very nature
+     as secret as they were perpetual and enormous."
+
+The reader of the "Life of Barneveld" must judge for himself whether in
+these and similar passages the historian was thinking solely of Maurice,
+the great military leader, of Barneveld, the great statesman, and of
+Aerssens, the recalled ambassador.  He will certainly find that there
+were "burning questions" for ministers to handle then as now, and
+recognize in "that visible atmosphere of power the poison of which it is
+so difficult to resist" a respiratory medium as well known to the
+nineteenth as to the seventeenth century.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+1874-1877.  AEt.  60-63.
+
+DEATH OF MRS. MOTLEY.--LAST VISIT TO AMERICA.--ILLNESS AND DEATH.-LADY
+HARCOURT'S COMMUNICATION.
+
+On the last day of 1874, the beloved wife, whose health had for some
+years been failing, was taken from him by death.  She had been the pride
+of his happier years, the stay and solace of those which had so tried his
+sensitive spirit.  The blow found him already weakened by mental
+suffering and bodily infirmity, and he never recovered from it.  Mr.
+Motley's last visit to America was in the summer and autumn of 1875.
+During several weeks which he passed at Nahant, a seaside resort near
+Boston, I saw him almost daily.  He walked feebly and with some little
+difficulty, and complained of a feeling of great weight in the right arm,
+which made writing laborious.  His handwriting had not betrayed any very
+obvious change, so far as I had noticed in his letters.  His features and
+speech were without any paralytic character.  His mind was clear except
+when, as on one or two occasions, he complained of some confused feeling,
+and walked a few minutes in the open air to compose himself.  His
+thoughts were always tending to revert to the almost worshipped companion
+from whom death had parted him a few months before.  Yet he could often
+be led away to other topics, and in talking of them could be betrayed
+into momentary cheerfulness of manner.  His long-enduring and all-
+pervading grief was not more a tribute to the virtues and graces of her
+whom he mourned than an evidence of the deeply affectionate nature which
+in other relations endeared him to so many whose friendship was a title
+to love and honor.
+
+I have now the privilege of once more recurring to the narrative of Mr.
+Motley's daughter, Lady Harcourt.
+
+     "The harassing work and mental distress of this time [after the
+     recall from England], acting on an acutely nervous organization,
+     began the process of undermining his constitution, of which we were
+     so soon to see the results.  It was not the least courageous act of
+     his life, that, smarting under a fresh wound, tired and unhappy, he
+     set his face immediately towards the accomplishment of fresh
+     literary labor.  After my sister's marriage in January he went to
+     the Hague to begin his researches in the archives for John of
+     Barneveld.  The Queen of the Netherlands had made ready a house
+     for us, and personally superintended every preparation for his
+     reception.  We remained there until the spring, and then removed to
+     a house more immediately in the town, a charming old-fashioned
+     mansion, once lived in by John de Witt, where he had a large library
+     and every domestic comfort during the year of his sojourn.  The
+     incessant literary labor in an enervating climate with enfeebled
+     health may have prepared the way for the first break in his
+     constitution, which was to show itself soon after.  There were many
+     compensations in the life about him.  He enjoyed the privilege of
+     constant companionship with one of the warmest hearts and finest
+     intellects which I have ever known in a woman,--the 'ame d'elite'
+     which has passed beyond this earth.  The gracious sentiment with
+     which the Queen sought to express her sense of what Holland owed him
+     would have been deeply felt even had her personal friendship been
+     less dear to us all.  From the King, the society of the Hague, and
+     the diplomatic circle we had many marks of kindness.  Once or twice
+     I made short journeys with him for change of air to Amsterdam, to
+     look for the portraits of John of Barneveld and his wife; to
+     Bohemia, where, with the lingering hope of occupying himself with
+     the Thirty Years' War, he looked carefully at the scene of
+     Wallenstein's death near Prague, and later to Varzin in Pomerania
+     for a week with Prince Bismarck, after the great events of the
+     Franco-German war.  In the autumn of 1872 we moved to England,
+     partly because it was evident that his health and my mother's
+     required a change; partly for private reasons to be near my sister
+     and her children.  The day after our arrival at Bournemouth occurred
+     the rupture of a vessel on the lungs, without any apparently
+     sufficient cause.  He recovered enough to revise and complete his
+     manuscript, and we thought him better, when at the end of July, in
+     London, he was struck down by the first attack of the head, which
+     robbed him of all after power of work, although the intellect
+     remained untouched.  Sir William Gull sent him to Cannes for the
+     winter, where he was seized with a violent internal inflammation,
+     in which I suppose there was again the indication of the lesion of
+     blood-vessels.  I am nearing the shadow now,--the time of which I
+     can hardly bear to write.  You know the terrible sorrow which
+     crushed him on the last day of 1874,--the grief which broke his
+     heart and from which he never rallied.  From that day it seems to me
+     that his life may be summed up in the two words,--patient waiting.
+     Never for one hour did her spirit leave him, and he strove to follow
+     its leading for the short and evil days left and the hope of the
+     life beyond.  I think I have never watched quietly and reverently
+     the traces of one personal character remaining so strongly impressed
+     on another nature.  With herself--depreciation and unselfishness she
+     would have been the last to believe how much of him was in her very
+     existence; nor could we have realized it until the parting came.
+     Henceforward, with the mind still there, but with the machinery
+     necessary to set it in motion disturbed and shattered, he could but
+     try to create small occupations with which to fill the hours of a
+     life which was only valued for his children's sake.  Kind and loving
+     friends in England and America soothed the passage, and our
+     gratitude for so many gracious acts is deep and true.  His love for
+     children, always a strong feeling, was gratified by the constant
+     presence of my sister's babies, the eldest, a little girl who bore
+     my mother's name, and had been her idol, being the companion of many
+     hours and his best comforter.  At the end the blow came swiftly and
+     suddenly, as he would have wished it.  It was a terrible shock to us
+     who had vainly hoped to keep him a few years longer, but at least he
+     was spared what he had dreaded with a great dread, a gradual failure
+     of mental or bodily power.  The mind was never clouded, the
+     affections never weakened, and after a few hours of unconscious
+     physical struggle he lay at rest, his face beautiful and calm,
+     without a trace of suffering or illness.  Once or twice he said, 'It
+     has come, it has come,' and there were a few broken words before
+     consciousness fled, but there was little time for messages or leave-
+     taking.  By a strange coincidence his life ended near the town of
+     Dorchester, in the mother country, as if the last hour brought with
+     it a reminiscence of his birthplace, and of his own dearly loved
+     mother.  By his own wish only the dates of his birth and death
+     appear upon his gravestone, with the text chosen by himself, 'In God
+     is light, and in him is no darkness at all.'"
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+
+CONCLUSION.--HIS CHARACTER.--HIS LABORS.--HIS REWARD.
+
+In closing this restricted and imperfect record of a life which merits,
+and in due time will, I trust, receive an ampler tribute, I cannot
+refrain from adding a few thoughts which naturally suggest themselves,
+and some of which may seem quite unnecessary to the reader who has
+followed the story of the historian and diplomatist's brilliant and
+eventful career.
+
+Mr. Motley came of a parentage which promised the gifts of mind and body
+very generally to be accounted for, in a measure at least, wherever we
+find them, by the blood of one or both of the parents.  They gave him
+special attractions and laid him open to not a few temptations.  Too
+many young men born to shine in social life, to sparkle, it may be,
+in conversation, perhaps in the lighter walks of literature, become
+agreeable idlers, self-indulgent, frivolous, incapable of large designs
+or sustained effort, lose every aspiration and forget every ideal.  Our
+gilded youth want such examples as this of Motley, not a solitary, but a
+conspicuous one, to teach them how much better is the restlessness of a
+noble ambition than the narcotized stupor of club-life or the vapid
+amusement of a dressed-up intercourse which too often requires a
+questionable flavor of forbidden license to render it endurable to
+persons of vivacious character and temperament.
+
+It would seem difficult for a man so flattered from his earliest days to
+be modest in his self-estimate; but Motley was never satisfied with
+himself.  He was impulsive, and was occasionally, I have heard it said,
+over excited, when his prejudices were roughly handled.  In all that
+related to the questions involved in our civil war, he was, no doubt,
+very sensitive.  He had heard so much that exasperated him in the foreign
+society which he had expected to be in full sympathy with the cause of
+liberty as against slavery, that he might be excused if he showed
+impatience when be met with similar sentiments among his own countrymen.
+He felt that he had been cruelly treated by his own government, and no
+one who conceives himself to have been wronged and insulted must be
+expected to reason in naked syllogisms on the propriety of the liberties
+which have been taken with his name and standing.  But with all his
+quickness of feeling, his manners were easy and courteous, simply because
+his nature was warm and kindly, and with all his natural fastidiousness
+there was nothing of the coxcomb about him.
+
+He must have had enemies, as all men of striking individuality are sure
+to have; his presence cast more uncouth patriots into the shade; his
+learning was a reproach to the ignorant, his fame was too bright a
+distinction; his high-bred air and refinement, which he could not help,
+would hardly commend him to the average citizen in an order of things in
+which mediocrity is at a premium, and the natural nobility of presence,
+which rarely comes without family antecedents to account for it, is not
+always agreeable to the many whose two ideals are the man on horseback
+and the man in his shirt-sleeves.  It may well be questioned whether
+Washington, with his grand manner, would be nearly as popular with what
+are called "the masses" as Lincoln, with his homely ways and broad
+stories.  The experiment of universal suffrage must render the waters
+of political and social life more or less turbid even if they remain
+innoxious.  The Cloaca Maxima can hardly mingle its contents with the
+stream of the Aqua Claudia, without taking something from its crystal
+clearness.  We need not go so far as one of our well-known politicians
+has recently gone in saying that no great man can reach the highest
+position in our government, but we can safely say that, apart from
+military fame, the loftiest and purest and finest personal qualities are
+not those which can be most depended upon at the ballot-box.  Strange
+stories are told of avowed opposition to Mr. Motley on the ground of the
+most trivial differences in point of taste in personal matters,--so told
+that it is hard to disbelieve them, and they show that the caprices which
+we might have thought belonged exclusively to absolute rulers among their
+mistresses or their minions may be felt in the councils of a great people
+which calls itself self-governing.  It is perfectly true that Mr. Motley
+did not illustrate the popular type of politician.  He was too high-
+minded, too scholarly, too generously industrious, too polished, too much
+at home in the highest European circles, too much courted for his
+personal fascinations, too remote from the trading world of caucus
+managers.  To degrade him, so far as official capital punishment could do
+it, was not merely to wrong one whom the nation should have delighted to
+honor as showing it to the world in the fairest flower of its young
+civilization, but it was an indignity to a representative of the highest
+scholarship of native growth, which every student in the land felt as a
+discouragement to all sound learning and noble ambition.
+
+If he was disappointed in his diplomatic career, he had enough, and more
+than enough, to console him in his brilliant literary triumphs.  He had
+earned them all by the most faithful and patient labor.  If he had not
+the "frame of adamant" of the Swedish hero, he had his "soul of fire."
+No labors could tire him, no difficulties affright him.  What most
+surprised those who knew him as a young man was, not his ambition, not
+his brilliancy, but his dogged, continuous capacity for work.  We have
+seen with what astonishment the old Dutch scholar, Groen van Prinsterer,
+looked upon a man who had wrestled with authors like Bor and Van Meteren,
+who had grappled with the mightiest folios and toiled undiscouraged among
+half-illegible manuscript records.  Having spared no pains in collecting
+his materials, he told his story, as we all know, with flowing ease and
+stirring vitality.  His views may have been more or less partial; Philip
+the Second may have deserved the pitying benevolence of poor Maximilian;
+Maurice may have wept as sincerely over the errors of Arminius as any one
+of "the crocodile crew that believe in election;" Barneveld and Grotius
+may have been on the road to Rome; none of these things seem probable,
+but if they were all proved true in opposition to his views, we should
+still have 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.
+
+Republics are said to be ungrateful; it might be truer to say that they
+are forgetful.  They forgive those who have wronged them as easily as
+they forget those who have done them good service.  But History never
+forgets and never forgives.  To her decision we may trust the question,
+whether the warm-hearted patriot who had stood up for his country nobly
+and manfully in the hour of trial, the great scholar and writer who had
+reflected honor upon her throughout the world of letters, the high-minded
+public servant, whose shortcomings it taxed the ingenuity of experts to
+make conspicuous enough to be presentable, was treated as such a citizen
+should have been dealt with.  His record is safe in her hands, and his
+memory will be precious always in the hearts of all who enjoyed his
+friendship.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX.
+
+A.
+
+THE SATURDAY CLUB.
+
+This club, of which we were both members, and which is still flourishing,
+came into existence in a very quiet sort of way at about the same time as
+"The Atlantic Monthly," and, although entirely unconnected with that
+magazine, included as members some of its chief contributors.  Of those
+who might have been met at some of the monthly gatherings in its earlier
+days I may mention Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Motley,
+Whipple, Whittier; Professors Agassiz and Peirce; John S. Dwight;
+Governor Andrew, Richard H. Dana, Junior, Charles Sumner.  It offered a
+wide gamut of intelligences, and the meetings were noteworthy occasions.
+If there was not a certain amount of "mutual admiration" among some of
+those I have mentioned it was a great pity, and implied a defect in the
+nature of men who were otherwise largely endowed.  The vitality of this
+club has depended in a great measure on its utter poverty in statutes and
+by-laws, its entire absence of formality, and its blessed freedom from
+speech-making.
+
+That holy man, Richard Baxter, says in his Preface to Alleine's
+"Alarm:"--
+
+     "I have done, when I have sought to remove a little scandal, which I
+     foresaw, that I should myself write the Preface to his Life where
+     himself and two of his friends make such a mention of my name, which
+     I cannot own; which will seem a praising him for praising me.  I
+     confess it looketh ill-favoredly in me. But I had not the power of
+     other men's writings, and durst not forbear that which was his due."
+
+I do not know that I have any occasion for a similar apology in printing
+the following lines read at a meeting of members of the Saturday Club and
+other friends who came together to bid farewell to Motley before his
+return to Europe in 1857.
+
+
+                         A PARTING HEALTH
+
+     Yes, we knew we must lose him,--though friendship may claim
+     To blend her green leaves with the laurels of fame,
+     Though fondly, at parting, we call him our own,
+     'T is the whisper of love when the bugle has blown.
+
+     As the rider that rests with the spur on his heel,
+     As the guardsman that sleeps in his corselet of steel,
+     As the archer that stands with his shaft on the string,
+     He stoops from his toil to the garland we bring.
+
+     What pictures yet slumber unborn in his loom
+     Till their warriors shall breathe and their beauties shall bloom,
+     While the tapestry lengthens the life-glowing dyes
+     That caught from our sunsets the stain of their skies!
+
+     In the alcoves of death, in the charnels of time,
+     Where flit the dark spectres of passion and crime,
+     There are triumphs untold, there are martyrs unsung,
+     There are heroes yet silent to speak with his tongue!
+
+     Let us hear the proud story that time has bequeathed
+     From lips that are warm with the freedom they breathed!
+     Let him summon its tyrants, and tell us their doom,
+     Though he sweep the black past like Van Tromp with his broom!
+
+     The dream flashes by, for the west-winds awake
+     On pampas, on prairie, o'er mountain and lake,
+     To bathe the swift bark, like a sea-girdled shrine
+     With incense they stole from the rose and the pine.
+
+     So fill a bright cup with the sunlight that gushed
+     When the dead summer's jewels were trampled and crushed;
+     THE TRUE KNIGHT OF LEARNING,--the world holds him dear,--
+
+     Love bless him, joy crown him, God speed his career!
+
+
+
+
+B.
+
+HABITS AND METHODS OF STUDY.
+
+Mr. Motley's daughter, Lady Harcourt, has favored me with many
+interesting particulars which I could not have learned except from a
+member of his own family.  Her description of his way of living and of
+working will be best given in her own words:--
+
+     "He generally rose early, the hour varying somewhat at different
+     parts of his life, according to his work and health.  Sometimes when
+     much absorbed by literary labor he would rise before seven, often
+     lighting his own fire, and with a cup of tea or coffee writing until
+     the family breakfast hour, after which his work was immediately
+     resumed, and be usually sat over his writing-table until late in the
+     afternoon, when he would take a short walk.  His dinner hour was
+     late, and he rarely worked at night.  During the early years of his
+     literary studies he led a life of great retirement.  Later, after
+     the publication of the 'Dutch Republic' and during the years of
+     official place, he was much in society in England, Austria, and
+     Holland.  He enjoyed social life, and particularly dining out,
+     keenly, but was very moderate and simple in all his personal habits,
+     and for many years before his death had entirely given up smoking.
+     His work, when not in his own library, was in the Archives of the
+     Netherlands, Brussels, Paris, the English State Paper Office, and
+     the British Museum, where he made his own researches, patiently and
+     laboriously consulting original manuscripts and reading masses of
+     correspondence, from which he afterwards sometimes caused copies to
+     be made, and where he worked for many consecutive hours a day.
+     After his material had been thus painfully and toilfully amassed,
+     the writing of his own story was always done at home, and his mind,
+     having digested the necessary matter, always poured itself forth in
+     writing so copiously that his revision was chiefly devoted to
+     reducing the over-abundance.  He never shrank from any of the
+     drudgery of preparation, but I think his own part of the work was
+     sheer pleasure to him."
+
+I should have mentioned that his residence in London while minister was
+at the house No. 17 Arlington Street, belonging to Lord Yarborough.
+
+
+
+
+C.
+
+SIR WILLIAM GULL's ACCOUNT OF HIS ILLNESS.
+
+I have availed myself of the permission implied in the subjoined letter
+of Sir William Gull to make large extracts from his account of Mr.
+Motley's condition while under his medical care.  In his earlier years he
+had often complained to me of those "nervous feelings connected with the
+respiration" referred to by this very distinguished physician.  I do not
+remember any other habitual trouble to which he was subject.
+
+                              74 BROOK STREET, GROSVENOR SQUARE, W.
+                                             February 13, 1878.
+MY DEAR SIR,--I send the notes of Mr. Motley's last illness, as I
+promised.  They are too technical for general readers, but you will make
+such exception as you require.  The medical details may interest your
+professional friends.  Mr. Motley's case was a striking illustration that
+the renal disease of so-called Bright's disease may supervene as part and
+parcel of a larger and antecedent change in the blood-vessels in other
+parts than the kidney.  .  .  .  I am, my dear sir,
+
+                              Yours very truly,
+                                        WILLIAM W.  GULL.
+
+To OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, ESQ.
+
+     I first saw Mr. Motley, I believe, about the year 1870, on account
+     of some nervous feelings connected with the respiration.  At that
+     time his general health was good, and all he complained of was
+     occasionally a feeling of oppression about the chest.  There were no
+     physical signs of anything abnormal, and the symptoms quite passed
+     away in the course of time, and with the use of simple antispasmodic
+     remedies, such as camphor and the like.  This was my first interview
+     with Mr. Motley, and I was naturally glad to have the opportunity of
+     making his acquaintance.  I remember that in our conversation I
+     jokingly said that my wife could hardly forgive him for not making
+     her hero, Henri IV., a perfect character, and the earnestness with
+     which he replied 'au serieux,' I assure you I have fairly recorded
+     the facts.  After this date I did not see Mr. Motley for some time.
+     He had three slight attacks of haemoptysis in the autumn of 1872,
+     but no physical signs of change in the lung tissue resulted.  So
+     early as this I noticed that there were signs of commencing
+     thickening in the heart, as shown by the degree and extent of its
+     impulse.  The condition of his health, though at that time not very
+     obviously failing, a good deal arrested my attention, as I thought I
+     could perceive in the occurrence of the haemoptysis, and in the
+     cardiac hypertrophy, the early beginnings of vascular degeneration.
+
+     In August, 1873, occurred the remarkable seizure, from the effects
+     of which Mr. Motley never recovered.  I did not see him in the
+     attack, but was informed, as far as I can remember, that he was on a
+     casual visit at a friend's house at luncheon (or it might have been
+     dinner), when he suddenly became strangely excited, but not quite
+     unconscious.  .  .  .  I believed at the time, and do so still, that
+     there was some capillary apoplexy of the convolutions.  The attack
+     was attended with some hemiplegic weakness on the right side, and
+     altered sensation, and ever after there was a want of freedom and
+     ease both in the gait and in the use of the arm of that side.  To my
+     inquiries from time to time how the arm was, the patient would
+     always flex and extend it freely, but nearly always used the
+     expression, "There is a bedevilment in it;" though the handwriting
+     was not much, if at all, altered.
+
+     In December, 1873, Mr. Motley went by my advice to Cannes.  I wrote
+     the following letter at the time to my friend Dr. Frank, who was
+     practising there:--
+
+          [This letter, every word of which was of value to the
+          practitioner who was to have charge of the patient, relates
+          many of the facts given above, and I shall therefore only give
+          extracts from it.]
+
+                                             December 29, 1873.
+
+     MY DEAR DR. FRANK,--My friend Mr. Motley, the historian and late
+     American Minister, whose name and fame no doubt you know very well,
+     has by my advice come to Cannes for the winter and spring, and I
+     have promised him to give you some account of his case.  To me it is
+     one of special interest, and personally, as respects the subject of
+     it, of painful interest.  I have known Mr. Motley for some time, but
+     he consulted me for the present condition about midsummer.
+
+     .  .  .  If I have formed a correct opinion of the pathology of the
+     case, I believe the smaller vessels are degenerating in several
+     parts of the vascular area, lung, brain, and kidneys.  With this
+     view I have suggested a change of climate, a nourishing diet, etc.;
+     and it is to be hoped, and I trust expected, that by great attention
+     to the conditions of hygiene, internal and external, the progress of
+     degeneration may be retarded.  I have no doubt you will find, as
+     time goes on, increasing evidence of renal change, but this is
+     rather a coincidence and consequence than a cause, though no doubt
+     when the renal change has reached a certain point, it becomes in its
+     own way a factor of other lesions.  I have troubled you at this
+     length because my mind is much occupied with the pathology of these
+     cases, and because no case can, on personal grounds, more strongly
+     challenge our attention.
+
+                                        Yours very truly,
+                                                  WILLIAM W. GULL.
+
+     During the spring of 1874, whilst at Cannes, Mr. Motley had a sharp
+     attack of nephritis, attended with fever; but on returning to
+     England in July there was no important change in the health.  The
+     weakness of the side continued, and the inability to undertake any
+     mental work.  The signs of cardiac hypertrophy were more distinct.
+     In the beginning of the year 1875 I wrote as follows:--
+
+                                                  February 20, 1875.
+
+     MY DEAR Mr. MOTLEY,--.  .  .  The examination I have just made
+     appears to indicate that the main conditions of your health are more
+     stable than they were some months ago, and would therefore be so far
+     in favor of your going to America in the summer, as we talked of.
+     The ground of my doubt has lain in the possibility of such a trip
+     further disordering the circulation.  Of this, I hope, there is now
+     less risk.
+
+
+     On the 4th of June, 1875, I received the following letter:--
+
+                              CALVERLY PARK HOTEL, TUNBRIDGE WELLS,
+                                                  June 4, 1875.
+
+     MY DEAR SIR WILLIAM,--I have been absent from town for a long time,
+     but am to be there on the 9th and 10th.  Could I make an appointment
+     with you for either of those days?  I am anxious to have a full
+     consultation with you before leaving for America.  Our departure is
+     fixed for the 19th of this month.  I have not been worse than usual
+     of late.  I think myself, on the contrary, rather stronger, and it
+     is almost impossible for me not to make my visit to America this
+     summer, unless you should absolutely prohibit it.  If neither of
+     those days should suit you, could you kindly suggest another day?
+     I hope, however, you can spare me half an hour on one of those days,
+     as I like to get as much of this bracing air as I can.  Will you
+     kindly name the hour when I may call on you, and address me at this
+     hotel.  Excuse this slovenly note in pencil, but it fatigues my head
+     and arm much more to sit at a writing-table with pen and ink.
+
+                                   Always most sincerely yours,
+                                             My dear Sir William,
+                                                       J. L. MOTLEY.
+
+     On Mr. Motley's return from America I saw him, and found him, I
+     thought, rather better in general health than when he left England.
+
+     In December, 1875, Mr. Motley consulted me for trouble of vision in
+     reading or walking, from sensations like those produced by flakes of
+     falling snow coming between him and the objects he was looking at.
+     Mr. Bowman, one of our most excellent oculists, was then consulted.
+     Mr. Bowman wrote to me as follows: "Such symptoms as exist point
+     rather to disturbed retinal function than to any brain-mischief.  It
+     is, however, quite likely that what you fear for the brain may have
+     had its counterpart in the nerve-structures of the eye, and as he is
+     short-sighted, this tendency may be further intensified."
+
+     Mr. Bowman suggested no more than such an arrangement of glasses as
+     might put the eyes, when in use, under better optic conditions.
+
+     The year 1876 was passed over without any special change worth
+     notice.  The walking powers were much impeded by the want of control
+     over the right leg.  The mind was entirely clear, though Mr. Motley
+     did not feel equal, and indeed had been advised not to apply
+     himself, to any literary work.  Occasional conversations, when I had
+     interviews with him on the subject of his health, proved that the
+     attack which had weakened the movements of the right side had not
+     impaired the mental power.  The most noticeable change which had
+     come over Mr. Motley since I first knew him was due to the death of
+     Mrs. Motley in December, 1874.  It had in fact not only profoundly
+     depressed him, but, if I may so express it, had removed the centre
+     of his thought to a new world.  In long conversations with me of a
+     speculative kind, after that painful event, it was plain how much
+     his point of view of the whole course and relation of things had
+     changed.  His mind was the last to dogmatize on any subject.  There
+     was a candid and childlike desire to know, with an equal confession
+     of the incapacity of the human intellect.  I wish I could recall the
+     actual expressions he used, but the sense was that which has been so
+     well stated by Hooker in concluding an exhortation against the pride
+     of the human intellect, where he remarks:--
+
+     "Dangerous it were for the feeble brain of man to wade far into the
+     doings of the Most High; whom although to know be life, and joy to
+     make mention of His Name, yet our soundest knowledge is to know that
+     we know Him, not indeed as He is, neither can know Him; and our
+     safest eloquence concerning Him is our silence, when we confess
+     without confession that His glory is inexplicable, His greatness
+     above our capacity and reach.  He is above and we upon earth;
+     therefore it behoveth our words to be wary and few."
+
+     Mrs. Motley's illness was not a long one, and the nature of it was
+     such that its course could with certainty be predicted.  Mr. Motley
+     and her children passed the remaining days of her life, extending
+     over about a month, with her, in the mutual under standing that she
+     was soon to part from them.  The character of the illness, and the
+     natural exhaustion of her strength by suffering, lessened the shock
+     of her death, though not the loss, to those who survived her.
+
+     The last time I saw Mr. Motley was, I believe, about two months
+     before his death, March 28, 1877.  There was no great change in his
+     health, but he complained of indescribable sensations in his nervous
+     system, and felt as if losing the whole power of walking, but this
+     was not obvious in his gait, although he walked shorter distances
+     than before.  I heard no more of him until I was suddenly summoned
+     on the 29th of May into Devonshire to see him.  The telegram I
+     received was so urgent, that I suspected some rupture of a blood-
+     vessel in the brain, and that I should hardly reach him alive; and
+     this was the case.  About two o'clock in the day he complained of a
+     feeling of faintness, said he felt ill and should not recover; and
+     in a few minutes was insensible with symptoms of ingravescent
+     apoplexy.  There was extensive haemorrhage into the brain, as shown
+     by post-mortem examination, the cerebral vessels being atheromatous.
+     The fatal haemorrhage had occurred into the lateral ventricles, from
+     rupture of one of the middle cerebral arteries.
+
+                                   I am, my dear Sir,
+                                             Yours very truly,
+                                                       WILLIAM W.  GULL.
+
+
+
+E.
+
+FROM THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS SOCIETY.
+
+At a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society, held on Thursday,
+the 14th of June, 1877, after the reading of the records of the preceding
+meeting, the president, the Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, spoke as follows:
+
+     "Our first thoughts to-day, gentlemen, are of those whom we may not
+     again welcome to these halls.  We shall be in no mood, certainly,
+     for entering on other subjects this morning until we have given some
+     expression to our deep sense of the loss--the double loss--which our
+     Society has sustained since our last monthly meeting."--[Edmund
+     Quincy died May 17.  John Lothrop Motley died May 29.]
+
+After a most interesting and cordial tribute to his friend, Mr. Quincy,
+Mr. Winthrop continued:
+
+     "The death of our distinguished associate, Motley, can hardly have
+     taken many of us by surprise.  Sudden at the moment of its
+     occurrence, we had long been more or less prepared for it by his
+     failing health.  It must, indeed, have been quite too evident to
+     those who had seen him, during the last two or three years, that his
+     life-work was finished.  I think he so regarded it himself.
+
+     "Hopes may have been occasionally revived in the hearts of his
+     friends, and even in his own heart, that his long-cherished purpose
+     of completing a History of the Thirty Years' War, as the grand
+     consummation of his historical labors,--for which all his other
+     volumes seemed to him to have been but the preludes and overtures,--
+     might still be accomplished.  But such hopes, faint and flickering
+     from his first attack, had well-nigh died away.  They were like
+     Prescott's hopes of completing his 'Philip the Second,' or like
+     Macaulay's hopes of finishing his brilliant 'History of England.'
+
+     "But great as may be the loss to literature of such a crowning work
+     from Motley's pen, it was by no means necessary to the completeness
+     of his own fame.  His 'Rise of the Dutch Republic,' his 'History of
+     the United Netherlands,' and his 'Life of John of Barneveld,' had
+     abundantly established his reputation, and given him a fixed place
+     among the most eminent historians of our country and of our age.
+
+     "No American writer, certainly, has secured a wider recognition or a
+     higher appreciation from the scholars of the Old World.  The
+     universities of England and the learned societies of Europe have
+     bestowed upon him their largest honors.  It happened to me to be in
+     Paris when he was first chosen a corresponding member of the
+     Institute, and when his claims were canvassed with the freedom and
+     earnestness which peculiarly characterize such a candidacy in
+     France.  There was no mistaking the profound impression which his
+     first work had made on the minds of such men as Guizot and Mignet.
+     Within a year or two past, a still higher honor has been awarded him
+     from the same source.  The journals not long ago announced his
+     election as one of the six foreign associates of the French Academy
+     of Moral and Political Sciences,--a distinction which Prescott would
+     probably have attained had he lived a few years longer, until there
+     was a vacancy, but which, as a matter of fact, I believe, Motley was
+     the only American writer, except the late Edward Livingston, of
+     Louisiana, who has actually enjoyed.
+
+     "Residing much abroad, for the purpose of pursuing his historical
+     researches, he had become the associate and friend of the most
+     eminent literary men in almost all parts of the world, and the
+     singular charms of his conversation and manners had made him a
+     favorite guest in the most refined and exalted circles.
+
+     "Of his relations to political and public life, this is hardly the
+     occasion or the moment for speaking in detail.  Misconstructions and
+     injustices are the proverbial lot of those who occupy eminent
+     position.  It was a duke of Vienna, if I remember rightly, whom
+     Shakespeare, in his 'Measure for Measure,' introduces as
+     exclaiming,--
+
+               'O place and greatness, millions of false eyes
+               Are stuck upon thee!  Volumes of report
+               Run with these false and most contrarious quests
+               Upon thy doings!  Thousand 'stapes of wit
+               Make thee the father of their idle dream,
+               And rack thee in their fancies!'
+
+     "I forbear from all application of the lines.  It is enough for me,
+     certainly, to say here, to-day, that our country was proud to be
+     represented at the courts of Vienna and London successively by a
+     gentleman of so much culture and accomplishment as Mr. Motley, and
+     that the circumstances of his recall were deeply regretted by us
+     all.
+
+     "His fame, however, was quite beyond the reach of any such
+     accidents, and could neither be enhanced nor impaired by
+     appointments or removals.  As a powerful and brilliant historian we
+     pay him our unanimous tribute of admiration and regret, and give him
+     a place in our memories by the side of Prescott and Irving.  I do
+     not forget how many of us lament him, also, as a cherished friend.
+
+     "He died on the 29th ultimo, at the house of his daughter, Mrs.
+     Sheridan, in Dorsetshire, England, and an impressive tribute to his
+     memory was paid, in Westminster Abbey, on the following Sunday, by
+     our Honorary Member, Dean Stanley.  Such a tribute, from such lips,
+     and with such surroundings, leaves nothing to be desired in the way
+     of eulogy.  He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, by the side of
+     his beloved wife.
+
+     "One might well say of Motley precisely what he said of Prescott, in
+     a letter from Rome to our associate, Mr. William Amory, immediately
+     on hearing of Prescott's death: 'I feel inexpressibly disappointed--
+     speaking now for an instant purely from a literary point of view--
+     that the noble and crowning monument of his life, for which he had
+     laid such massive foundations, and the structure of which had been
+     carried forward in such a grand and masterly manner, must remain
+     uncompleted, like the unfinished peristyle of some stately and
+     beautiful temple on which the night of time has suddenly descended.
+     But, still, the works which his great and untiring hand had already
+     thoroughly finished will remain to attest his learning and genius,--
+     a precious and perpetual possession for his country."
+
+               .................................
+
+The President now called on Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said:--
+
+     "The thoughts which suggest themselves upon this occasion are such
+     as belong to the personal memories of the dear friends whom we have
+     lost, rather than to their literary labors, the just tribute to
+     which must wait for a calmer hour than the present, following so
+     closely as it does on our bereavement."
+
+               .................................
+
+     "His first literary venture of any note was the story called
+     'Morton's Hope; or, The Memoirs of a Provincial.'  This first effort
+     failed to satisfy the critics, the public, or himself.  His
+     personality pervaded the characters and times which he portrayed,
+     so that there was a discord between the actor and his costume.
+     Brilliant passages could not save it; and it was plain enough that
+     he must ripen into something better before the world would give him
+     the reception which surely awaited him if he should find his true
+     destination.
+
+     "The early failures of a great writer are like the first sketches
+     of a great artist, and well reward patient study.  More than this,
+     the first efforts of poets and story-tellers are very commonly
+     palimpsests: beneath the rhymes or the fiction one can almost always
+     spell out the characters which betray the writer's self.  Take these
+     passages from the story just referred to:
+
+     "'Ah! flattery is a sweet and intoxicating potion, whether we drink
+     it from an earthen ewer or a golden chalice.  .  .  .  Flattery from
+     man to woman is expected: it is a part of the courtesy of society;
+     but when the divinity descends from the altar to burn incense to the
+     priest, what wonder if the idolater should feel himself transformed
+     into a god!'
+
+     "He had run the risk of being spoiled, but he had a safeguard in his
+     aspirations.
+
+     "'My ambitious anticipations,' says Morton, in the story, were as
+     boundless as they were various and conflicting.  There was not a
+     path which leads to glory in which I was not destined to gather
+     laurels.  As a warrior, I would conquer and overrun the world; as a
+     statesman, I would reorganize and govern it; as a historian, I would
+     consign it all to immortality; and, in my leisure moments, I would
+     be a great poet and a man of the world.'
+
+     "Who can doubt that in this passage of his story he is picturing his
+     own visions, one of the fairest of which was destined to become
+     reality?
+
+     "But there was another element in his character, which those who
+     knew him best recognized as one with which he had to struggle hard,
+     --that is, a modesty which sometimes tended to collapse into self-
+     distrust.  This, too, betrays itself in the sentences which follow
+     those just quoted:--
+
+     "'In short,' says Morton, 'I was already enrolled in that large
+     category of what are called young men of genius, .  .  .  men of
+     whom unheard-of things are expected; till after long preparation
+     comes a portentous failure, and then they are forgotten.  .  .  .
+     Alas!  for the golden imaginations of our youth.  .  .  .  They are
+     all disappointments.  They are bright and beautiful, but they fade.'"
+
+                    ...........................
+
+The President appointed Professor Lowell to write the Memoir of Mr.
+Quincy, and Dr. Holmes that of Mr. Motley, for the Society's
+"Proceedings."
+
+Professor William Everett then spoke as follows:
+
+     "There is one incident, sir, in Mr. Motley's career that has not
+     been mentioned to-day, which is, perhaps, most vividly remembered by
+     those of us who were in Europe at the outbreak of our civil war in
+     1861.  At that time, the ignorance of Englishmen, friendly or
+     otherwise, about America, was infinite: they knew very little of us,
+     and that little wrong.  Americans were overwhelmed with questions,
+     taunts, threats, misrepresentations, the outgrowth of ignorance, and
+     ignoring worse than ignorance, from every class of Englishmen.
+     Never was an authoritative exposition of our hopes and policy worse
+     needed; and there was no one to do it.  The outgoing diplomatic
+     agents represented a bygone order of things; the representatives of
+     Mr. Lincoln's administration had not come.  At that time of anxiety,
+     Mr. Motley, living in England as a private person, came forward with
+     two letters in the 'Times,' which set forth the cause of the United
+     States once and for all.  No unofficial, and few official, men could
+     have spoken with such authority, and been so certain of obtaining a
+     hearing from Englishmen.  Thereafter, amid all the clouds of
+     falsehood and ridicule which we had to encounter, there was one
+     lighthouse fixed on a rock to which we could go for foothold, from
+     which we could not be driven, and against which all assaults were
+     impotent.
+
+     "There can be no question that the effect produced by these letters
+     helped, if help had been needed, to point out Mr. Motley as a
+     candidate for high diplomatic place who could not be overlooked.
+     Their value was recognized alike by his fellow-citizens in America
+     and his admirers in England; but none valued them more than the
+     little band of exiles, who were struggling against terrible odds,
+     and who rejoiced with a great joy to see the stars and stripes,
+     whose centennial anniversary those guns are now celebrating, planted
+     by a hand so truly worthy to rally every American to its support."
+
+
+
+G.
+
+POEM BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.
+
+I cannot close this Memoir more appropriately than by appending the
+following poetical tribute:--
+
+                    IN MEMORY OF JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.
+
+                         BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.
+
+               Sleep, Motley, with the great of ancient days,
+                    Who wrote for all the years that yet shall be.
+               Sleep with Herodotus, whose name and praise
+                    Have reached the isles of earth's remotest sea.
+               Sleep, while, defiant of the slow delays
+                    Of Time, thy glorious writings speak for thee
+               And in the answering heart of millions raise
+                    The generous zeal for Right and Liberty.
+               And should the days o'ertake us, when, at last,
+                    The silence that--ere yet a human pen
+               Had traced the slenderest record of the past
+                    Hushed the primeval languages of men
+               Upon our English tongue its spell shall cast,
+                    Thy memory shall perish only then.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+An order of things in which mediocrity is at a premium
+Better is the restlessness of a noble ambition
+Blessed freedom from speech-making
+Flattery is a sweet and intoxicating potion
+Forget those who have done them good service
+His dogged, continuous capacity for work
+His learning was a reproach to the ignorant
+History never forgets and never forgives
+Mediocrity is at a premium
+No great man can reach the highest position in our government
+Over excited, when his prejudices were roughly handled
+Plain enough that he is telling his own story
+Republics are said to be ungrateful
+They knew very little of us, and that little wrong
+Visible atmosphere of power the poison of which
+Wonders whether it has found its harbor or only lost its anchor
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4727 ***