The moment, however, he published in octavo volumes a solid history, and appended to the bottom of each page the obscure authorities on which his narrative was founded, and which plainly exhibited the capacity of the brilliant declaimer to perform all the austerest duties of the drudge, his reputation marvellously increased among the most frigid and most exacting dispensers of praise.  To come nearer home, we remember the time when Bancroft’s rhetoric entirely shut out from the eyes of antiquaries and men of taste Bancroft’s industry and scholarship.  It was not until he plainly showed his power to “toil terribly,” not until he palpably added to our knowledge of American history, that men who had sneered at his occasional rhapsodies of patriotism admitted his claims to be considered the historian of the United States.  They resisted Bancroft as long as Bancroft gave them the slightest reason to believe that he was interposing his own mind between them and facts which they know its well as he; but when, by independent and indefatigable research, at home and abroad, he indisputably widened the sphere of their information, they pardoned the faults of the rhetorician in their gratitude to the toiling investigator who had added to their knowledge.

It is the felicity of Mr. Motley, that, like Prescott, he is not placed under the necessity of overcoming prejudices.  There is nobody on either side of the Atlantic (whether we use the word as indicating its limited sense as an ocean, or its larger and more liberal moaning as a magazine) who would not rejoice in his success, and be grieved by his failure.  And this good feeling on the part of the public he owes, in a great degree, to the individuality he has impressed upon his work.  That individuality is not the individuality of a partisan or of a theorist, but the individuality of a broad-minded, high-minded, chivalrous gentleman.  With a soul open to the finest sentiments and ideas of the age in which he lives, tolerant of frailty, but intolerant of meanness, falsehood, and malignity, and writing with the frankness with which a cultivated man of decided opinions might speak to a company of chosen associates, the most obstinate bigot can hardly fail to feel the charm of his free and cordial manner of expression.  Hume, Gibbon, Hallam, and Macaulay, Sismondi, Guizot, and Michelet, all have in their characters something which invites and provokes opposition.  But the spirit which underlies Mr. Motley’s large scholarship is so thoroughly genial and generous, and is so purified from the pedantry of knowledge and the pedantry of opinion, that it is impossible for him to rouse in other minds any of the antipathy which is often felt for powerful individualities whose powers of mind and extent of erudition still enforce respect and extort admiration.  The instinctive sympathy he thus creates is due to no lack of intrepidity in expressing his love for what is right and his hatred for what is wrong.  No historian is more decisive in his judgments,