Byzantine, three-eighths Gothic, and the remainder Greek.  But Motley, with all his varied learning and association, is still perfectly and nobly Anglo-Saxon.  His short, epigrammatic sentences ring like the click of musketry before the charge, and swell into length and grandeur with the progress of his theme.  The simplicity, not of ignorance but of genius, characterizes him.  He does not cater to our hungry fancy, he appeals grandly to our noblest impulses.  In Motley a spirit of the most refined humanity is everywhere visible; he is guilty of no Voltairean satiric stabs at purity, no petulant Voltairean flings at the faith he does not share.  All is manly, terse, frank, undisguised.  Honorable himself, he does not, like Gibbon, distrust all mankind, and question with a sarcasm the very sincerity of a martyr at the stake.

Among Americans, Motley is what Botta is to the historians of Southern Europe.  The same grand principles actuate both writers; the same tendency to philosophical generalization is evident in the structure of their works, the same inflexible pursuit of a fixed and visible aim, the same enthusiastic love for freedom.  But with Botta the poetical element, which is only secondary with Motley, predominates.  He holds the nervous pen of a true Italian—­more than that, of a true Italian patriot.  All the hitherto suppressed fire of his nation flames out on his pages in an indignation as natural as it is superb.  His lines vibrate with passion, his words are tremulous with a noble pain.  His very pathos is impatient, stern, and proud; it cleaves our hearts like a battle-axe, rather than meets them as with summer showers.  His sarcasm is as keen and effective, but far more startling; it hisses its way from some iron-cold comment, and stabs the monarch whom it crowns.  His fertility of imagination is not weakened by contact with the details of government.  The same pen that draws in such inimitably graceful lines the sugar-plums of starving Genoa, lingering about flower-wreathed baskets of bonbons sold in the public squares to famishing men and women, sketches in a style as nervous and appropriate the complex detail of governmental policy.  He unfolds his subject with the skill of an epic poet; its general effect is sublime, and its petty details arranged with a rarely careless skill.  If he is sometimes diverted by a burst of enthusiasm, of indignation, or of horror, into an inequality, the rough island thrown up in the sea of his fancy is speedily verdured over with the wonderful luxuriance of his genius.  If he bends sometimes to amuse, to revel among his sonorous Italian adjectives in the description of a coronation at Milan, or an opera of Valetta, it is part of his purpose, giving to his picture the rich and glowing tints that bring out, by violence of contrast, the more elaborate tinting in of dark upon dark behind them.