How to express his sent from the house. chivalrous, and the most abused of men. It would do your heart good to hear his invocations to that deeply injured shade, and his denunciations of the ignorant and vulgar Protestants who have defamed him." And again: "We have nothing green here but the Archduke Max, who firmly believes that he is going forth to Mexico to establish an American empire, and that it is his divine ments with which he overwhelmed it. His two long letters in the London Times going over the whole grounds of the controversy produced a marked effect on the public opinion of England. He was like a man possessed-a fervid missionary of a political creed on which, as he thought, the salvation of a There are characteristic touches in these nation depended. When he returned to the letters from Vienna which are exquisite in United States in 1861, his old American the humor with which he flouts all despotic companions, sufficiently excited themselves, theories. Thus he speaks of the Archduke were astonished at the superior zeal and Maximilian: "He adores bull-fights, and vehemence of his patriotism. Mr. Lincoln rather regrets the Inquisition, and considappointed him minister to Austria, and oners the Duke of Alva every thing noble and his way to his post he stopped a short time in England to have another tussle with his English opponents. When he arrived at Vienna he wrote, under date of November 16, 1861, to Holmes: "I do what good I can. I think I made some impression on Lord John Russell, with whom I spent two days after my arrival in England, and I talked very frankly and as strongly as I could to Palmerston, and I have had long conversa-mission to destroy the dragon of democracy, tions and correspondences with other lead- and establish the true Church, the Right ing men in England. I have also had an Divine, and all sorts of games. Poor young hour's conversation with Thouvenal in Par-man!" is. I hammered the Northern view into him as soundly as I could......Our fate is in our own hands, and Europe is looking on to see which side is strongest. When it has made the discovery, it will back it as also the best and most moral......Yesterday I had my audience with the Emperor. He received me with much cordiality, and seemed interested in the long account which I gave him of our affairs. You may suppose I inculcated the Northern views. We spoke in his vernacular, and he asked me afterward if I was a German. I mention this not from vanity, but because he asked it with earnestness, as if it had a political significance." This must have been the first time that an American ambassador at the Austrian court was suspected of being a German, owing to the ease and rapidity with which he conversed in the language, and the absolute purity of his pronunciation. His mind and feelings were so wrought up by the calamities of his country that in the early years of the war he almost abandoned literary work altogether, and it was only when the side he so passionately espoused was plainly nearing success that he resumed it. "I wish," he wrote to Holmes, in 1862, "I could bore you about something else but American politics. But there is nothing else worth thinking of in the world. All else is leather and prunella. We are living over again the days of the Dutchmen, or the seventeenth-century Englishmen." He early took strong ground for the emancipation of the slaves. When he heard of the news of the battle of Gettysburg and the surrender of Vicksburg, his family, with the exception of his youngest child, were ab Mr. Sumner was in the habit of telling, with much humor, one amusing incident in Motley's diplomatic career in Vienna. After the close of the joint war of Prussia and Austria against Denmark on the question of the duchies, Bismarck came to Vienna to settle the terms of peace with the Emperor. He arrived too late to go to the office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and remembering that his old university chum, Motley, was the American minister, he drove directly to his house, and found Motley just retiring from a modest family dinner, with nothing but the remains of the dessert on the table. The old friends cordially joined hands and hearts; fresh viands were furnished from Motley's kitchen and fresh Burgundy from his cellar, and for hour after hour the old collegians went over their student experiences and frolics at the University of Berlin, without speaking a word about politics. After cracking his last walnut and swallowing his last glass of wine, Bismarck, long after midnight, left Motley's house, and sauntered away whistling to his hotel with an immense internal satisfaction at the entertainment he had derived from his first night's experience at Vienna. But the eyes of Europe were all this time on the terrible man of “blood and iron." The foreign embassies were in an uproar. Was it possible that there was to be an alliance between Prussia and the United States? It was known that New York was, in respect to its German population, the third or fourth German city in the world. What meant this mysterious visit to the American minister-the first visit the dreaded Prussian statesman had made on entering Vienna? Telegrams flew to London, Paris, Turin, and St. Petersburg. The ingenuity of diplomatists was taxed to an animated if not controversial tone. Motaccount for what was unaccountable. Sum- ley delighted in this association, as it gave ner himself, as chairman of the Senate Com- full play for the friendly collision of his own mittee of Foreign Affairs, received private intellect with the intellects of others—intelletters from eminent persons abroad earnest- lects of which some were as keen, bright, ly inquiring whether the United States had and rapid as his own. "Always remember resolved to depart from non-interference me," he wrote from Vienna, "to the club, with the affairs of Europe, as recommended one and all. It touches me nearly when you by the immortal Washington, etc.-absurd assure me that I am not forgotten by them. letters, at which Sumner, who knew Mot-To-morrow is Saturday, the last of the ley's early associations with Bismarck, ex-month [the time of the meeting of the club]. hibited his teeth in the most genial and We are going to dine with our Spanish colhumorous of smiles. He laughed with Mot-league. But the first bumper of the Don's ley over the occurrence some years after- Champagne I shall drain to the health of ward, when the affair was explained to him my Parker House friends." On his return just as he had divined it. It is a pity that to Boston in 1868 he was, of course, warmthis one humorous incident in the whole ly welcomed by the fraternity, whose monthdreary correspondence of the American De-ly dinners he constantly attended. Perhaps, partment of State with its ministers abroad as Dr. Holmes has described the club generis not recorded in any state paper. But it ally in a note to his biography, it may not is certain that for a day or two it seriously be an indecorum to lift the veil from one of disturbed the consultations of every cabinet its dinners in which he bore a main part in in Europe. the conversational achievements. Motley Motley was six years in Vienna, and then laid down some proposition, which Holmes, resigned, in a fit of indignation growing out of course, instantly doubted, and then Lowof the miserable M'Cracken affair. Mr. John ell plunged in, differing both from Motley Bigelow has lately published a defense of and Holmes. A triangular duel ensued, with Mr. Seward's conduct in this business, the an occasional ringing sentence thrown in by amount of which is that Mr. Seward could Judge Hoar for the benevolent purpose of not have shielded Motley from President increasing a complication already sufficient Johnson's jealous irrational anger without to task the wit and resource of the comrunning the risk of being himself dismissed batants. In ordinary discussion one perfrom the State Department-a catastrophe which he contemplated with horror, as it might, in the President's then irritable and suspicious state of mind, lead to some new appointment disastrous to the country. Dr. Holmes considers the defense as little better than an impeachment, and Mr. Bigelow himself does not make the most of his case. son is allowed to talk at least for a half or a quarter of a minute before his brother athletes rush in upon him with their replies; but in this debate all three talked at once, with a velocity of tongue which fully matched their velocity of thought. Still, in the incessant din of voices, every point made by one was replied to by another or ridiculed by a third, and was instantly followed by new statements and counter-statements, arguments and counter-arguments, and all directed to a definite end. The curiosity of the thing was that neither of the combatants repeated any thing which had been once thrown out of the controversy as irrelevant, and that while speaking all to The historian, after his resignation, returned with new zeal to his historical labors, and in 1868 published the last two volumes of his History of the United Nether-hits and retorts, all germane to the matter, lands. Their reception showed how different was the estimate formed of Motley's mind and character, by the great public of Europe and the United States, from the estimate of him formed by Mr. Andrew Johnson and Mr. Andrew Johnson's special ambassa-gether the course of the discussion was as dor (truly) extraordinary abroad, Mr. George W. M'Cracken. In the summer of 1868 he returned with his family to Boston, and was warmly greeted by all his old friends. He appeared to be in the full vigor of bodily and mental health, and his powers of conversation were such as surprised the most redoubtable talkers of that city. Dr. Holmes mentions his connection with the Saturday Club of Boston—an association composed of some fifteen or twenty persons, who were elected to membership on the ground that they were generally opposed to each other in mind, character, and pursuits, and that therefore conversation at the monthly dinner of the club would naturally assume quite clear to the mind as though there had been a minute's pause between statement and reply. The discussion was finished in fifteen minutes; if conducted under the ordinary rules of conversation, it would have lasted a couple of hours, without adding a new thought, or fact, or stroke of wit applicable to the question in debate. The other members of the club looked on in mute wonder while witnessing these feats of intellectual and vocal gymnastics. If any other man but Judge Hoar had ventured in, his voice and thought would both have been half a minute behind the point which the discussion had reached, and would therefore have been of no account in the arguments which contributed to bring it to a close. On this occasion I had no astronomical clock to consult, but, judging by the ear, I came to the conclusion that in swiftness of utterance Motley was two-sixteenths of a second ahead of Holmes, and nine-sixteenths of a second ahead of Lowell. On the last day of the year in which this noble work appeared, Mrs. Motley died. This blow, coming as it did in the midst of bodily illness and mental distress, broke his heart. He visited the United States for the last time in the summer of 1875; returned to England in the autumn; and after struggling manfully for more than two years with the illness which prevented him from In the autumn of 1868 Motley warmly supported Grant for the Presidency. For the victorious general he had then a genu-engaging in any strenuous mental exertion, ine admiration. Shortly after Grant was he died peacefully on the 29th of May, 1877, sworn in he was appointed minister to Eng- the last words on his lips being, "It has land, and unanimously confirmed by the Sen- come! it has come !" He was buried by the ate. He accepted the post with some mis-side of his wife in Kensal Green Cemetery. givings; but still, when he sailed from the country he had no reason to suppose that he left a single enemy behind him. The wretched story of his recall is told by Dr. Holmes with admirable temper, but yet with an incisive vigor of style and thought which demolishes every pretense by which the real reason for his dismissal has been attempted to be disguised. On his grave-stone the simple dates of his birth and death are given, followed by a text chosen by himself: "In God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all." In judging Mr. Motley as a historian we must first refer to the importance of the great European epoch to which his histories are devoted. He seized, with the divining glance of genius, on that exact point in European history where Man, if we may so express it, first came into resolute hostility to Privileged Men. The reader who fails to perceive this fundamental fact will follow the course of his thoughtful, picturesque, and glowing narratives without catching his main purpose. The government of the United States, the inheritor of the ideas of Human Rights, the struggles of whose champions with monarchs and nobles, through tumults, battles, sieges, proscriptions, and massacres, he spent his life in depicting, twice appoint It would be a curious subject of inquiry, whether or not Grant ever read The Rise of the Dutch Republic. There are so many points of similarity between his best and noblest qualities and those of William the Silent, that, if he had read the book, one would think that Motley's vivid presentation of the Dutch hero would have endeared the author to him. Indeed, Motley was so confident of the support of Grant that when vague rumors of his intended removal reached him he spoke of them slightingly. "Of one thing I am sure," he said, "anded him to represent itself in Europe, and that is the friendship of the President." twice subjected him to insults which no honorable gentleman could bear without remonstrance and indignation. His enemies and defamers will gain no additional reputation by having their names associated with his; but the historian whom they attempted to dishonor will be held in grateful remembrance by the American people as the man who first explored the obscure sources and vitalized the representation of the ideas, the events, and the martyrdoms whose final result was the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. There can be little doubt that Motley's sensitive nature was stung to the quick by the act of his government. President Johnson treated him with sheer brutality, and though he was justly irritated, he did not feel himself dishonored; but what cut him to the heart in the conduct of President Grant was the attempt to show that his dismissal from office was due to his disobedience of the instructions of his government, thus placing him, as he supposed, before the eyes of Europe and America as a disgraced minister. The wrong wrung his very soul, His work, as he originally conceived it, was and he could never forgive, nor, what was to have the general title of "The Eighty worse, he never could forget it. Still, he Years' War for Liberty," comprehending the resumed his historical studies; and in 1874 three volumes of The Rise of the Dutch Republic, published the Life and Death of John of Barne- | the four volumes of The History of the United veld, a continuation of the History of the United Netherlands, the two volumes of The Life and Netherlands, and bringing his Dutch annals Death of John of Barneveld, and The History of down to the commencement of the Thirty the Thirty Years' War, ending with The Peace Years' War. Valuable and interesting as of Westphalia, in 1648. The last-mentioned the work is, it may be said that if he had history, which would have been the crownshortened Barneveld's life by a half, he ing event of his literary career, he did not might have lengthened his own; for the live long enough even to begin, though he materials were more intractable than any must have accumulated large materials for he had before encountered, the handwriting it. The portions of his grand plan which especially of the great Advocate of Holland he did complete are among the most valbeing so bad as almost to be undecipherable | uable contributions to history which the even by the aid of the microscope. present century, singularly rich in historic who were systematically deceived did not always arrive at correct conclusions." Motley thus "interviews," as it were, all the sovereigns, statesmen, generals, and churchmen of the sixteenth century, so that through him we know them as we know, or rather, perhaps, as we do not know, the leading personages of our own time. he derived from his subject-matter. His daughter mentions that for years before his death he did not indulge even in the student's luxury of smoking. He once laughingly said to me that what cured him of the habit was the circumstance that when he went to Europe he could get no good cigars. The charm of his narrative style comes from his unwithholding self-abandonment to the scenes, events, and persons that filled his mind to overflowing. al literature, has produced; for his nine octavos are based on sources of information still remaining in manuscript, and which, in many cases, he was the first to discover and investigate. In this task of original research he worked, in his own emphatic language, like "a brute beast." The novelty and importance of many of the facts he thus rescued from oblivion gained for him After having thus amassed and digested the respect and esteem of every historical his materials, the task of composition seems scholar in Europe, for there was hardly a to have been to Motley a positive pleasure. European nation on whose history his re- He could write from an early hour in the searches did not shed light. "For the his-morning to late in the afternoon of an Engtory of the United Provinces," as he himself lish day with unabated vigor and delight, said, "is not at all a provincial history. It receiving no other inspiration than what is the history of European liberty. Without the struggle of Holland and England against Spain, all Europe might have been Catholic and Spanish. It was Holland that saved England in the sixteenth century, and, by so doing, secured the triumph of the Reformation, and placed the independence of the various states of Europe upon a sure foundation." Indeed, his books illustrate the contemporary annals of England, France, and Germany almost as much as they do those of Holland and Belgium. Especially When a New England farmer was asked is this the case with the England of Eliza- to buy a machine which hatched eggs into beth and the Great Britain of James the chickens without the interposition of the First. He delved in the English State-paper | hen, he naturally objected that the thing Office and among the MSS. of the British Mu- could not be done better by the machine seum until he unearthed new facts which than by the hen; "and then, you know," he gave a shock of pleased surprise to many of added, "hens' time is worth nothing." In the most diligent English antiquaries and every estimate of a historian's penetrative historical students. Speaking of the liber- and persistent research into the obscure reality of modern European governments in cesses of history, his time, like the time of opening their archives to the inspection of the hen brooding over her eggs, is popularly the historian, he describes the advantages reckoned as worth nothing. Certainly no the latter now enjoys in words which liter- great history has ever been written, with the ally embody his own experience. "He leans exception, perhaps, of Macaulay's, which at over the shoulder of Philip the Second at his all remunerated the historian for the time writing-table, as the King spells patiently he expended on his work. But Motley, like out, with cipher key in hand, the most con- the other great historians of his period, decealed hieroglyphics of Parma or Guise or spised lucre as compared with fame, and Mendoza......He enters the cabinet of the was willing to consider his time as worth deeply pondering Burghley, and takes from nothing, provided he could add any thing the most private drawer the memoranda to historical knowledge. After his "brute which record that minister's unutterable work" was done--a work, however, which doubtings; he pulls from the dressing-gown required great intellectual discrimination folds of the stealthy, soft-gliding Walsing-in the separation of the wheat of history ham the last secret which he has picked from its chaff-he sat down to write his narfrom the Emperor's pigeon-holes or the rative in a perfect glow of moral and menPope's pocket, and which not Hatton, nor tal enthusiasm. Hence his style is not only Buckhurst, nor Leicester, nor the Lord spirited and impetuous, but joyous. Even Treasurer is to see-nobody but Elizabeth its defects testify to the elation of heart herself; he sits invisible at the most secret and brain out of which it spontaneously councils of the Nassaus and Barnevelds and sprang. Its fascination to the reader is due Buys, or pores with Farnese over coming to its freshness, vivacity, vigor, brilliancy, victories and vast schemes of universal con- and the spirit of enjoyment manifest in quest; he reads the latest bit of scandal, the every page. Its faults may be said to come minutest characteristic of king or minister, from the excess of its virtues. What is callchronicled by the gossiping Venetians for ed the "dignity of history" is frequently the edification of the Forty; and after all violated, but this violation is found to be this prying and eavesdropping, having seen the result of a more than common effort to the cross-purposes, the bribings, the wind-reach the reality of history. Motley had ings in the dark, he is not surprised if those come so intimately near to the interior life of the externally august personages who It is curious that it did not occur to Motimposed upon Europe in the sixteenth and ley while delineating such a character, who seventeenth centuries that he found it im- was, after all, next to the Pope, the head of possible to pay any proper regard to the Christendom, that Christianity itself was a grandeur of their station and the splendor religion unsuited to the fierce populations of their habiliments. He unfrocks and un- of Europe. There is a terrible phrase of clothes priest and king alike, and exhibits the Christian Church, meant to embody all both in the nudity of their essential feeble- its holy wrath against a possible foe of its ness or wickedness. He leaves not "a rag precepts and tenets. That phrase is "Antiof righteousness" on the form of any tyrant christ." Now in the sixteenth century, or bigot whom he selects for exposure, re- according to the principles of Christianity lentlessly stripping him of every pretension as embodied in its authentic documents, of self-delusion and self-justification by "Antichrist" was perfectly embodied in the which his crimes have been heretofore pal-person of the Most Catholic King. Chrisliated. He is among the first of those mod- tianity is essentially humane; Philip was ern historians who have had the courage to essentially inhuman. There is not a predeclare that the old tolerant plea of "sin- cept of Christ which Philip did not viocerity" in religious belief is no excuse for late on system. How much more sincere crimes which are committed by the bigots would it have been for him to have revived of that belief. Inhuman depravity is not the graceful heathenism of Greece and Rome, vindicated by tracing it to mistaken views and connected it as a point of faith with the of religious obligation. The inhumanity sanguinary practices of the early Druids, must condemn either the man or his belief. than to have disgraced Christianity by Motley's power of characterization is making it responsible for acts which every specially exhibited in his portraiture of good-natured worshipper of Jupiter and Philip the Second of Spain. He has fol- Venus would have recoiled from with horlowed, with the pitilessness of justice, the ror, and which no Druid priest familiar whole course of the life of that champion with bloody sacrifices could have been of "the true religion." Every low amour tempted by all Philip's mines of gold and in which he indulged is as well known to silver in the new America to indorse! In him as to the transitory harlot who for the reading the history of modern Europe one moment attracted the Most Catholic King's is constantly wondering why a paganism appetites. There is something almost vin- more brutal than that which obtained in dictive in the patience by which he proves Greece and Rome-a paganism which Socrathe Most Catholic King's violation of all tes and Cicero would have protested against those precepts of Christianity which are with all the eloquence of instinctive reason, intended to restrain sensual lusts. That morality, and humanity-should have dared Philip ever felt toward any woman that to call itself the religion of Christ. Perpassion which poets and decent men call haps if the course of Christianity had been love, is demonstrated by Motley to have directed to the East rather than to the West, been an impossibility. Ascending from it would have found in the Buddhists of vices of the senses to vices of the soul, the Asia more consistent disciples than it has relentless historian shows him to have been ever found in the "civilized" communities devoid of friendship even for such agents of Europe, where, history tells us, it has been of his will as Alva and Farnese, that there so often barbarously and grotesquely cariwas no good in him, and that of all the base catured. Philip's god was a combination and cruel men of his time, he was the basest of Belial and Moloch-a god representing and most cruel-worse even than the in- a magnified image of his own character. struments he employed to destroy political Atheism as to such a deity is the first condiand spiritual freedom by means of conquest tion of Christian faith. And yet he shot, and massacre. Motley sustains this opinion hanged, racked, burned, or buried alive all by citations from Philip's private letters, men, women, and children who refused to and there is hardly a dark line in the por- worship his god, that is, the apotheosis of trait which is not confirmed by Philip's Philip! own hand. The crowned monster hated the whole human race, and from his birth to his horrible death in torments unutterable, the historian paints him with a minuteness of touch which it is almost frightful to contemplate. Suetonius has black passages enough in his sketches of the Cæsars, but the cumulative effect of Mot-than he hated Mr. Ex-Secretary Fish, and ley's repeated proofs of the inhumanity of the second Philip exceeds in horror many of the most horrible pictures of depravity in the pages of the Roman historian. Philip the Second is Motley's favorite horror in historic characterization, as much as James the Second is Macaulay's. Both portraits are elaborated in a similar relentless fashion, epigram coming constantly in to add new zest to invective. Indeed, it may be said that Motley hated Philip even more Mr. Ex-Under-Secretary Bancroft Davis. |