Let no man despise the first efforts of immature genius.  Nothing can be more crude as a novel, nothing more disappointing, than “Morton’s Hope.”  But in no other of Motley’s writings do we get such an inside view of his character with its varied impulses, its capricious appetites, its unregulated forces, its impatient grasp for all kinds of knowledge.  With all his university experiences at home and abroad, it might be said with a large measure of truth that he was a self-educated man, as he had been a self-taught boy.  His instincts were too powerful to let him work quietly in the common round of school and college training.  Looking at him as his companions describe him, as he delineates himself ’mutato nomine,’ the chances of success would have seemed to all but truly prophetic eyes very doubtful, if not decidedly against him.  Too many brilliant young novel-readers and lovers of poetry, excused by their admirers for their shortcomings on the strength of their supposed birthright of “genius,” have ended where they began; flattered into the vain belief that they were men at eighteen or twenty, and finding out at fifty that they were and always had been nothing more than boys.  It was but a tangled skein of life that Motley’s book showed us at twenty-five, and older men might well have doubted whether it would ever be wound off in any continuous thread.  To repeat his own words, he had crowded together the materials for his work, but he had no pattern, and consequently never began to weave.

The more this first work of Motley’s is examined, the more are its faults as a story and its interest as a self-revelation made manifest to the reader.  The future historian, who spared no pains to be accurate, falls into the most extraordinary anachronisms in almost every chapter.  Brutus in a bob-wig, Othello in a swallow-tail coat, could hardly be more incongruously equipped than some of his characters in the manner of thought, the phrases, the way of bearing themselves which belong to them in the tale, but never could have belonged to characters of our Revolutionary period.  He goes so far in his carelessness as to mix up dates in such a way as almost to convince us that he never looked over his own manuscript or proofs.  His hero is in Prague in June, 1777, reading a letter received from America in less than a fortnight from the date of its being written; in August of the same year he is in the American camp, where he is found in the company of a certain Colonel Waldron, an officer of some standing in the Revolutionary Army, with whom he is said to have been constantly associated for some three months, having arrived in America, as he says, on the 15th of May, that is to say, six weeks or more before he sailed, according to his previous account.  Bohemia seems to have bewitched his chronology as it did Shakespeare’s geography.  To have made his story a consistent series of contradictions, Morton should have sailed from that Bohemian seashore which may be found in “A Winter’s Tale,” but not in the map of Europe.