It is but a glimpse of their young life which the great statesman gives us, but a bright and pleasing one.  Here were three students, one of whom was to range in the flowery fields of the loveliest of the sciences, another to make the dead past live over again in his burning pages, and a third to extend an empire as the botanist spread out a plant and the historian laid open a manuscript.

IV.

1834-1839. 2Et. 20-25.

Return to America.—­Study of law.—­Marriage.—­His first novel, “Morton’s hope.”

Of the years passed in the study of law after his return from Germany I have very little recollection, and nothing of importance to record.  He never became seriously engaged in the practice of the profession he had chosen.  I had known him pleasantly rather than intimately, and our different callings tended to separate us.  I met him, however, not very rarely, at one house where we were both received with the greatest cordiality, and where the attractions brought together many both young and old to enjoy the society of its charming and brilliant inmates.  This was at No. 14 Temple Place, where Mr. Park Benjamin was then living with his two sisters, both in the bloom of young womanhood.  Here Motley found the wife to whom his life owed so much of its success and its happiness.  Those who remember Mary Benjamin find it hard to speak of her in the common terms of praise which they award to the good and the lovely.  She was not only handsome and amiable and agreeable, but there was a cordial frankness, an openhearted sincerity about her which made her seem like a sister to those who could help becoming her lovers.  She stands quite apart in the memory of the friends who knew her best, even from the circle of young persons whose recollections they most cherish.  Yet hardly could one of them have foreseen all that she was to be to him whose life she was to share.  They were married on the 2d of March, 1837.  His intimate friend, Mr. Joseph Lewis Stackpole, was married at about the same time to her sister, thus joining still more closely in friendship the two young men who were already like brothers in their mutual affection.

Two years after his marriage, in 1839, appeared his first work, a novel in two volumes, called “Morton’s Hope.”  He had little reason to be gratified with its reception.  The general verdict was not favorable to it, and the leading critical journal of America, not usually harsh or cynical in its treatment of native authorship, did not even give it a place among its “Critical Notices,” but dropped a small-print extinguisher upon it in one of the pages of its “List of New Publications.”  Nothing could be more utterly disheartening than the unqualified condemnation passed upon the story.  At the same time the critic says that “no one can read ‘Morton’s Hope’ without perceiving it to have been written by a person of uncommon resources of mind and scholarship.”