For ourselves, we have no fear of lighting our own spirit thus through any Malabolge of purification.  And this bold faith animates Motley; it invigorates all his work with a firmness that inspires full confidence in his readers.  Free as he is from every puerile superstition, his mastery of his subject is complete.  He exercises over it a sort of magistracy which extends even to his own flashing impulses.  Never pausing to display his moral learning, he avoids the tedious diffuseness of Rollin; steering adroitly around the quicksands of political dissertation, he escapes the pragmatical essayism of Guiccardini.  Not easily fascinated by the trifles that swim like vapid foam upon the tide of history,—­petty domestic details, the Koenigsmark intrigues of royalty, the wines and flowers of the banquet table, the laces and jewels of the court,—­he leaves far in the distance the entertaining Davila, who, says the sarcastic Schlosser, ’wrote memoirs after the French fashion for good society,’ yet whom the arbitrary and adventurous Bolingbroke does not scruple to declare ’in many respects the equal of Livy!’ And yet no single stroke is omitted which is needed to preserve the unity of the work.  Tacitus himself did not embellish with more commanding morality his histories.  The jots and tittles of the Groot Privilegie, the terms of the famous ‘Pacification of Ghent,’ the solemn import of the Act of Adjuration, and the political ambition of the church, are as faithfully drawn as the Siege of Leyden, or the ‘Spanish Fury’ of Antwerp.

Hume, in the narrowness of a so-called philosophical indifference to the appeals of domestic life and the details of national theology and art, gives us only a running commentary upon mere chronological events, galvanized by the touch of his keen intellect and fine rhetoric into a deceitful vigor, and ornamented with the poisonous night-shade blossoms of a spurious philosophy.  We may more justly seek some analogy between Gibbon and Motley, even if the search but discover points of difference so radical that a comparison is impossible.  The solemn, measured, and splendid rhetoric of Gibbon is met by the animated, impetuous, and brilliant flow of Motley’s thought.  Neither leans to the ideal; with both the actual prevails.  The policy of a government is summoned by neither before the partial tribunal of a sentiment, or the intricate scheme of some Machiavelli subjected to the imperfect analysis of a headstrong imagination.  But Gibbon, though he writes in the vernacular, has lost all the honest nationality that should give an air of sincerity to his work; his brilliant antithesis belongs to the ornate school of the French literature of the day; and, fascinating as is the pomp and commanding march of his sentences, we are rather dazzled by his eloquence than convinced by his argument.  He is picturesque, rich; but it is the picturesqueness and richness of the truly bewildering Roman architecture of the Renaissance—­half