John Lothrop Motley, Massachusetts-born historian of early modern Europe from the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain in the mid-sixteenth century until the eve of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), won overwhelming popular acclaim for his first major historical work, The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1856). It is very much history in the grand manner, deeply affected by Motley's Protestant and libertarian passions, and also powerfully swayed by the approach of disunion in the United States when it was being written. But for all of its high place in romantic historiography in the age of Thomas Babington Macaulay, Thomas Carlyle, and James Anthony Froude, the work is superficial and crudely derivative of Friedrich von Schiller and Robert Watson. Motley was somewhat embarrassed by his own success, becoming increasingly aware of his book's crudities when compared with the profound work being carried out by Dutch historians, and he made...