the moonlit square is at once hailed by me as a man and a brother. I call him by his Christian name at once." The inspiring influence of Motley's work began to tell upon his letter-writing, in which there are new dashes and flashes; his romance and enthusiasm were fully roused, his blood was aglow, and warmed his love of beauty in nature and art to higher ardor. In the same letter to Dr. Holmes, or one written about the same time, he bursts into panegyric of Rubens, concluding with the fine phrase," With what muscular, masculine vigor this splendid Fleming rushed in and plucked up drowning Art by the locks!" It was in 1854 or '55 that he met Miss Fanny Alexander at Florence, whither he had gone doubtless on the track of defunct Farneses, and wrote of her wonderful drawings, her artistic education "formed in the school of the Florentine Quattro-Centisti," of her faithful, loving study of peasant life and lore, twenty-five years or more before Mr. Ruskin found out "Francesca" and made her famous. It is about the same time that Bismarck suddenly starts upon Motley's private stage: they had been college cronies at Göttingen and had cherished a warm regard for each other through years of absence, which blazed up on meeting again with the heartiness of student days, with a gleam of something like fascination on Bismarck's part. His strongly-marked, high-colored, aggressive figure reappears from time to time, either in his own letters or in Motley's descriptions, to the end of the book, animating it more than all the other men and women who come and go through its chapters. Motley writes to his wife on his first visit to Bismarck, "It is one of those houses where every one does what one likes. The showapartments where they receive formal company are on the front of the house. Their living-rooms, however, are a salon and a dining-room at the back, opening upon the garden. Here there are young and old, grandparents and children and dogs all at once, eating, drinking, smoking, piano-playing, and pistol-firing (in the garden) all going on at the same time. It is one of those establishments where every earthly thing that can be eaten or drunk is offered you, porter, soda-water, small-beer, champagne, burgundy, or claret are about all the time, and everybody is smoking the best Havana cigars every minute." The years were flying by, bringing Motley fame and a competency, but leaving him still hard at work: his correspondence tells of the drudgery of collecting materials from original documents and despatches, the mountains of useless manuscripts to be cut through to find the vein, or maybe the grain, of truth one is in search of, and he says that nothing can repay such labors, unless the work be its own reward. His industry in acquiring new languages, in finding the key to forgotten ciphers, in mastering the puzzle of illegible handwriting, bore witness to the disinterested patience which he brought to his work. If he was impetuous and headlong in the conduct of life, he was an untiring, persevering scholar. Sometimes he almost shrank back as the task spread instead of lessening under his hands. "My canvas is very broad," he wrote to his mother when beginning the "United Netherlands," "and the massing and composition will give me more trouble than the more compact one which I have already painted." A year and a half later he writes to her again: "I am hard at work, but, alas! my work grows and ex pands around me every day. I am like the conjurer's apprentice in the German, ballad who raised a whole crowd of spectres and demons by stealing his master's wand and then did not know how to exorcise them and get rid of them. The apparitions of the sixteenth century rise upon me, phantom after phantom, each more intrusive and appalling than the others, and I feel that I have got myself into a mob of goblins who are likely to be too much for me." But amidst his labors rewards of every sort were pouring in upon him, and recognition, the best reward that man can give. His letters from London in 1858 mark the setting in of the spring tide of success which was to know no ebb. His correspondence at this epoch is addressed chiefly to his parents, wife, or daughters, as he might be separated from one or the others: some of the extracts already given show that there was no lack of intellectual companionship in his own family, yet under the circumstances letters to one's nearest kin are naturally full of mere personal details. Again Motley's affectionate, amiable disposition may be traced in this chronicle, not of small-beer, as he says, but of the champagne-froth of social life, for the amusement of his family, while he was doing his daily stint of composition and keeping up as best he might under that hundred-lashed scourge of daily notes in the London season. His letters from 1858 to 1860, whether from England or from the Continent, have the general flavor of ordinary memoirs in the enumeration of well-known names, descriptions of fêtes and public occasions, meetings with celebrated people. He often illustrates them by a stroke or a touch which raises them above the commonplace dribble which he vehemently accuses them of being. A notable quality of Motley's shows out in letters of this sort,-his good nature. Allowing much to Mr. Curtis's discreet and judicious editing, he might have sifted out every rough and bitter husk, but he must have sifted the very kernel from these intimate gossipings had they not been free from spite and malice. How ill-natured and treacherous a good-humored man can be, may be seen in the correspondence of the great Humboldt with Varnhagen von Ense, and from the memoirs of Bacourt, who went away from America leaving all his acquaintances under the delusion that he was delighted with them and the country. If anybody after reading Motley's histories doubts his talent for epigram and satire, a discerning reader will not look far for the proof of it in his correspondence: his sense of the ludicrous was as quick as his sense of beauty, and made his reticence in this respect the more praiseworthy. He could give a caricature in a very few words: "The King of Saxony [1853] is a mild old gentleman wadded and bolstered into very harmonious proportions. He has a single tooth, worn carelessly on one side." Lord Brougham himself could hardly have helped laughing at the portrait Motley made of him, touching and retouching it after each sitting: "He is exactly like the pictures in Punch, only Punch flatters him. . His face, like his tongue and his mind, is shrewd, sharp, and humorous. His hair is thick, snow-white, and shiny; his head is large and knobby and bumpy... The rugged outlines or headlands of his face are wild and bleak, but not forbidding. Deep furrows of age and thought and toil, perhaps of sorrow, run all over it, while the vast mouth, with a ripple of humor ever playing around it, expands like a placid bay under the huge promontory of his fantastic and incredible nose. . . There certainly never was a great statesman and author who so irresistibly suggested the man who does the comic business at a small theatre.. There is no resisting his nose. It is not merely the configuration of that wonderful feature which surprises you, but its mobility. It has the litheness and almost the length of an elephant's proboscis, and I have no doubt he can pick up pins or scratch his back with it as easily as he could take a pinch of snuff. He is always twisting it about in a fabulous manner." On the solemn occasion of receiving their D.C.L. at Oxford, Motley writes, "Nothing could be more absurd than old Brougham's figure, long and gaunt, with snow-white hair under the great black porringer, and his wonderful nose wagging from side to side as he hitched up his red petticoats and stalked through the mud." The culmination of Motley's life may be dated from his visit to the Hague in August, 1858, by no means the first, when his acquaintance with the Queen of Holland began, so long sought by her and eschewed by him. For the next twelve years he was at the zenith of his fame and popularity, if such a word can be applied to a man so invincibly fastidious and exclusive in his social tastes, at the height of his powers, in the fulness of his ardent, versatile nature. The War of Secession kindled his patriotism, always alive and glowing, to a splendid flame, and the only shadows on his brilliant career were those cast by the mistakes and misfortunes of his country. At his post of United States minister to Vienna his heart and thoughts were in America, and his hopes and fears were centred in that long struggle. He felt keen disappointment at the inconsistency of English sympathy, and he wrote no more vigorous passages, terse with the logic of passion, than those in which he summed up the national situation to present it to the bemuddled brains of Great Britain. They reverberate from the replies of John Bright and J. S. Mill, who were steady, if not very hearty, friends of the North. Motley's overcharged feelings broke out sometimes: August 18, 1862, he began a letter to his mother, "My dearest mother, -It seems to me at times as if I could not sit out this war in exile." His heart was like to break at the news of defeat and death, above all the death of the young: "Putnam, Lowell, . . . both among their equals distinguished for talent, character, accomplishments, and virtue, for all that makes youth venerable." The interchange of letters between himself and Dr. Holmes thrills with the emotions of those four years. The civil war had hardly come to an end before the Austro-Prussian campaign startled the world by its brief, conclusive course, and Motley, in spite of his friendship and admiration for Bismarck, sided entirely with the Austrian Empire, which he considered to have been cozened and bullied. He puts the case of the Prussian demand that Austria shall disarm, and the ensuing steps of both nations, with sarcastic succinctness in one of his home letters at the time. But he admits that Austria is suffering for the sins of former centuries, "to say nothing of the early part of this one. There are no real catastrophes in history." The episode of Motley's resignation from the mission to Vienna is not given in his published correspondence, although, unfortunately, he wrote and talked superabundantly about it, as well as of the still more painful incident of his dismissal from his post as minister to England. They are given in detail by Dr. Holmes in his memoir. The discredit of both falls wholly upon our government: it is only to be regretted that Motley could not have borne his galling wrongs with the dignity of silence. He needed no vindication with those to whom he wished to vindicate himself, and the sentiment of his country was altogether in his favor. He lost no jot of the consideration of his friends abroad or at home; his personal distinction and celebrity as an author were undimmed; but his life was embittered by the intrigues and injustice of politicians, which he mistook for the ingratitude of the country he loved so passionately and had served so loyally. Private misfortune began to darken his days; he lost his parents within a few years of each other, at a ripe old age, but while the bonds of filial attachment were as strong and clinging as in his youth; overwork and strain of feeling brought on hemorrhage of the lungs, followed before many months by an attack resembling paralysis, but which was probably of the nature of nervous prostration. From this he never thoroughly rallied, and, while bearing the burden of enfeebled powers, physical and mental, he met with an irreparable loss in the death of his wife. Two of his daughters married, and loneliness gathered about him, notwithstanding the devotion of his youngest child and the assiduity and affection of many friends. The last letter of the collection is to his eldest daughter, Lady William Vernon Harcourt, twelve days before his death. It is short, but full of the same loving allusions to his grandchildren with which the correspondence abounds for his children in their nursery days. So the record ends. Amateurs of the memoirs and correspondence of distinguished men merely as archives of the gossip of the great world will find these volumes unsatisfactory. It is true that a long list of celebrated names can be compiled from them, often coupled with descriptions and anecdotes. Motley saw enough of Mrs. Norton, her pretty, witty sister Lady Dufferin and her worthy son, of the present Lord Lytton, Thackeray, Lord Houghton,-then Monckton Milnes,—Mr. and Mrs. Grote, Carlyle, Layard, Stirling, Lord John Russell, Dean Milman, Lady Byron, Hayward, Kinglake, Tom Hughes, Dean Stanley, the Duke of Argyll, Lord and Lady Palmerston, to have something to say about them,-to speak of English society only. But his letters were not filled with tittle-tattle about the famous people whom he knew, still less about those whom he did not know, and he constantly compares his rapid telling off of "who were there," to the Court Journal. The extraneous interest of the correspondence lies in the letters of Mill, Bright, Dean Stanley, Bismarck, Hawthorne, Lowell, and Dr. Holmes: the long-continued exchange of thought, sympathy, and criticism between the last-named and Motley is a beautiful chapter by itself. As was said before, what is chiefly to be got from these posthumous revelations is the knowledge of Motley as a man. In life he was greatly loved and admired, yet often misunderstood and harshly judged; his letters are his best defence. His faults were as conspicuous as his talents, and where that is the case a certain class of shallow, vulgar, or hypocritical censors find more to blame than in mortals of their own calibre, or even of a baser sort. Most people, and the best, will recognize in the letters, as his contemporaries did in the writer, a great and generous nature, akin to everything lovely, heroic, tender; one whose rare capacity for enjoyment made him at once eager and exacting in his pleasures, while a noble need for work prevented his making pleasure a pursuit. It offered itself in its most alluring guise when he was sought by English people illustrious in letters, politics, society; but he saw the snare, and wrote, "The cultivated luxury of these regions has poison in it, I fear;" "It is well not to indulge too long and copiously in the Circean draught of English hospitality !" He dwelt on its enervating effect on an American, who can become only "a half-hardy plant in an atmosphere and soil which are not indigenous." "I am most sincere when I say that I should never wish America to be Anglicized in the aristocratic sense. . . A fearful price is paid by the English people in order that this splendid aristocracy, with their parks, and castles, and shootings, and fishings, and fox-huntings, their stately and unlimited hospitality, their learned ease and lettered leisure, may grow fat." The sense of duty, guardian of the soul, abode in him, and must have had many a tussle with the erratic tendencies of his temperament. But that it kept its foothold we have proofs: his unforgetful love of his mother, which did not let his pen grow slack or cold during half a lifetime of separation; his fond paternal affection, not blinding him to his children's faults nor causing him to neglect their training; his stanch and steadfast regard for old friends, whose coming he hailed and whom he went out of his way to welcome when he was in the greedy grasp of London society, so monopolizing and tenacious; the earnestness with which he fulfilled his task when once he knew the task that was marked out for him; last, not least, his deep and fervent patriotism,-these sterling virtues make John Lothrop Motley's character a counterpart to his scintillating genius. S. B. Wister. Is AN INFLUENCE. SEE thee,-heaven's unclouded face Its sunshine a subservient grace I feel thee, as the billows feel A river freshening the brine, John B. Tabb. |