Both of young Motley’s playmates have furnished me with recollections of him and of those around him at this period of his life, and I cannot do better than borrow freely from their communications.  His father was a man of decided character, social, vivacious, witty, a lover of books, and himself not unknown as a writer, being the author of one or more of the well remembered “Jack Downing” letters.  He was fond of having the boys read to him from such authors as Channing and Irving, and criticised their way of reading with discriminating judgment and taste.  Mrs. Motley was a woman who could not be looked upon without admiration.  I remember well the sweet dignity of her aspect, her “regal beauty,” as Mr. Phillips truly styles it, and the charm of her serene and noble presence, which made her the type of a perfect motherhood.  Her character corresponded to the promise of her gracious aspect.  She was one of the fondest of mothers, but not thoughtlessly indulgent to the boy from whom she hoped and expected more than she thought it wise to let him know.  The story used to be current that in their younger days this father and mother were the handsomest pair the town of Boston could show.  This son of theirs was “rather tall,” says Mr. Phillips, “lithe, very graceful in movement and gesture, and there was something marked and admirable in the set of his head on his shoulders,”—­a peculiar elegance which was most noticeable in those later days when I knew him.  Lady Byron long afterwards spoke of him as more like her husband in appearance than any other person she had met; but Mr. Phillips, who remembers the first bloom of his boyhood and youth, thinks he was handsomer than any portrait of Byron represents the poet.  “He could not have been eleven years old,” says the same correspondent, “when he began writing a novel.  It opened, I remember, not with one solitary horseman, but with two, riding up to an inn in the valley of the Housatonic.  Neither of us had ever seen the Housatonic, but it sounded grand and romantic.  Two chapters were finished.”

There is not much remembered of the single summer he passed at Mr. Green’s school at Jamaica Plain.  From that school he went to Round Hill, Northampton, then under the care of Mr. Cogswell and Mr. Bancroft.  The historian of the United States could hardly have dreamed that the handsome boy of ten years was to take his place at the side of his teacher in the first rank of writers in his own department.  Motley came to Round Hill, as one of his schoolmates tells me, with a great reputation, especially as a declaimer.  He had a remarkable facility for acquiring languages, excelled as a reader and as a writer, and was the object of general admiration for his many gifts.  There is some reason to think that the flattery he received was for a time a hindrance to his progress and the development of his character.  He obtained praise too easily, and learned to trust too much to his genius.  He had everything to spoil him,—­beauty,