And this element was LABOR.  The rich lowlands of the ‘double-armed’ Rhine teemed with a busy life, that, king-like, demanded a tribute of the sea, and wrenched from the greedy waves a treasure that its industry made priceless.  Each man became a prince in his own divine right, and every occupation had its lords and its lore, its ‘mysteries,’ and its social rights.  The seamen, merchants, and artisans of the Netherlands had made their country the richest in Europe.  They ranged the seas and learned the value of the land; and while they fed the great despot of the Middle Ages, the light of intelligence, born of energy and nurtured by activity, cast its benignant gleams from the central island of the Rhine, and drove from their mountain nooks the owls and bats of tyranny and superstition.  They fought first, these lords of the soil, among themselves, for local privileges, advancing in their continuous struggles upon the very threshold of the church.  By strong alliances they kept at bay their feudal lords, and fettered the ecclesiastical power with the yoke of a justice, meagre, indeed, and sadly unfruitful, but still ominous of a better day.  Within the alabaster vase of despotism, frail, yet old as ambition, the lamp of freedom had long burned dimly:  now its flames were licking, with serpent-like tongues, the enclosure so long deemed sacred, and threatened, as they dyed the air with their amber flood of light, to shiver their temple to fragments.  The theory of the divine right of kings was but another ’Luck of Edenhall.’  Its slender stem trembled now within the rough grasp of the sacrilegious and burly Netherlanders, who hesitated not long ere they dashed it with the old superstition to the ground, shaking the civilized world to its centre by the shock.  But out of the ruins a statelier edifice was to rise, whose windows, like those of the old legend, were stained by the lifeblood of its architect.

The historian who would worthily depict such an age, such a people, such principles, must be an artist, but one in whom the creative faculty does not blind the moral obligations.  He must bring to the work a republican sympathy, must be governed by a republican justice, and wear a character as noble as the struggle that he paints.  And such an artist, such a historian, such a man, we have in JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.

The honors of Harvard, early and nobly earned, had given to the boy at seventeen the privileges and dignity of manhood.  He was destined to become a scholar, eminent, even among the rarely and richly cultured minds of his own New England, for his universal knowledge, clearness of intellect, prompt energy, and indomitable perseverance.  Inspired by these gifts and attainments, it was only natural, almost inevitable, that his first appearance upon the literary stage should have been in the role of a novelist.  The active young intellect was pliant and strong, but had not yet learned its power.  Before him lay the broad