fields of romance, fascinating with their royal fleurs de lis, rich with the contributions of every age, some quaint and laughter-moving, some pompous and exaggerated, some soul-stirring and grand.  Impelled, perhaps, less by a thirst for fame than a desire to satisfy the resistless impulses of an energetic nature, and lay those fair ghosts of enterprises dimly recognized that beckoned him onward, he followed the first path that lay before him, and became a romance writer.  His first work, Morton’s Hope, or the Memoirs of a Provincial, was published in 1839, and subsequently appeared Merry Mount, a Romance of Massachusetts.  It is curious to trace in these first flights of a genius that has since learned its legitimate field, a tendency to the breadth of Motley’s later efforts, an instinctive and evidently unconscious passion for the descriptive, an admirably curbed yet still powerful impatience of the light fetters, the toy regulations of the realm of Fiction, and an earnestness that has since bloomed in the world of Fact and History.  The very imperfections of the novelist have become the charms of the historian.  His student-life in Germany, his after-plot in the stirring Revolutionary times, strongly as they are drawn, animated as they are with dashes of that vivid power that stamps every page of the histories of their author, yet lack the proof of that unquestioned yet unobtrusive consciousness of genius that harden the telling sentences of the Rise of the Dutch Republic and the United Netherlands into blocks of adamant, polished by friction with each other to a diamond brightness, and reflecting only the noblest sentiments, the most profound principles.  The dice had been thrown a second time, and Motley had not won a victory.  The applause of the press was insufficient to the man, who felt that he had not yet struck the key-note of his destiny.  To be counted the follower of Cooper was not the meet guerdon of an intellect to which the shapely monuments of ancient literature yielded the clue to their hieroglyphic labyrinths of knowledge, and that pierced with lightning swiftness the shell of events, and possessed the latent principles of life in their warm hearts.  He returned, therefore, to Europe, leaving behind him a reputation which at no distant day was destined to spring from a new and more noble foundation into a lasting and more stately pile.

To a mind like Motley’s, the department of history presented the most attractive features.  There could honestly be no dabbling with the specious and seductive alchemy of Fiction.  Truth had molded every period of the world’s life.  Truth defied had tripped up nations in their headlong race after dominion and unrighteous power.  Truth victorious had smiled upon their steady growth to greatness and honor.  To write history was to write poetry, art, philosophy, religion, life.  The pen that sketched the rise, the progress, and the fate of nations, was in fact the chisel of a sculptor, whose theme was humanity.