Not less faithful portraitures of the influences that formed them are the histories of Livy, of Sallust, and of Tacitus.  They wrote in a language that had been sublimated into electric clouds by the warm and splendid diffuseness of Cicero, and reduced to a granite-like strength by the cold and exquisite simplicity of Terence.  The amiable fustian, the Falstaffian bombast of Lucan and Ovid’s brilliant imagination, all stamp their indelible seal upon the vivid coloring of Livy, the somewhat affected severity of Sallust, and the elegant morality of Tacitus.  The banner of the monarchy flaunts across every page of these writers.  They even bear the impress of an architecture whose splendor and strength did not atone for its disregard of the old Hellenic lines and rules.  They bear the same relation to Thucydides and Herodotus that a pillar of the Roman Ionic order, with its angularly turned volutes and arbitrary perpendicularity of outline, does to its graceful Greek mother, with her primitive and expressive scrolls, and the slightly convex profile of her shaft.  In more modern times, a black-letter, quaint sentence of Froissart or Monstrelet is like a knight in full armor, bristling with quaint, beautiful devices, golden dragons inlaid on Milan cuirasses, golden vines on broad Venetian blades, apes on the hilts of grooved-bladed, firm stilettoes, or the illuminated margins of old metrical romances.  The pages of Strada are darkened by the stormy passions of a battling age, crossed with the lurid light of Moorish tragedies; an ay de mi Alhama moans under his pride and bigotry.  Torquemadas grind each sentence into dullness and inquisitorial harmlessness, yet now and then sweeps by a trace of Lope de Vega, a word that reminds us of Calderon, while still oftener the euphuism of Gongora pervades the writer’s mind and flows in platitudes from his guarded pen.

As we near our own day, history is invested with new dignities; its arms float, sea-weed like, on the raging waves of political life, as if to grasp from some fragment of shipwrecked treaties or some passing argosy of government a precious jewel to light its deep researches.  It takes in with nervous grasp the tendencies of literature; its keen gaze drinks in the features of popular belief and searches out the fountains of popular error.  Fully equal to the requirements of the exacting age, Motley has produced a work whose lightest merit is its equal conformity to the new rules of his art.  He possesses in an eminent degree the first qualification which the old Abbe de Mably, in his Maniere d’ecrire l’histoire, insists upon for the historian.  He recognizes the natural rights of man, those rights which are the same in every age, and as powerful in their demands in the sixteenth century as in the nineteenth.  His well-balanced mind acknowledges and respects the duties of man as citizen and magistrate, and the mutual rights of nations.  No splendor, no power, no prejudice, has been able to seduce him from his high