In the same letter Mr. Amory refers to a very different experience in Mr. Motley’s life,—­his one year of service as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, 1849.

“In respect to the one term during which he was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, I can recall only one thing, to which he often and laughingly alluded.  Motley, as the Chairman of the Committee on Education, made, as he thought, a most masterly report.  It was very elaborate, and, as he supposed, unanswerable; but Boutwell, then a young man from some country town [Groton, Mass.], rose, and as Motley always said, demolished the report, so that he was unable to defend it against the attack.  You can imagine his disgust, after the pains he had taken to render it unassailable, to find himself, as he expressed it, ‘on his own dunghill,’ ignominiously beaten.  While the result exalted his opinion of the speech-making faculty of a Representative of a common school education, it at the same time cured him of any ambition for political promotion in Massachusetts.”

To my letter of inquiry about this matter, Hon. George S. Boutwell courteously returned the following answer:—­

Boston, October 14, 1878.

My dear sir,—­As my memory serves me, Mr. Motley was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in the year 1847 1849.  It may be well to consult the manual for that year.  I recollect the controversy over the report from the Committee on Education.

His failure was not due to his want of faculty or to the vigor of
his opponents.

In truth he espoused the weak side of the question and the unpopular one also.  His proposition was to endow the colleges at the expense of the fund for the support of the common schools.  Failure was inevitable.  Neither Webster nor Choate could have carried the bill.

Very truly,
Geo. S. Boutwell.

No one could be more ready and willing to recognize his own failures than Motley.  He was as honest and manly, perhaps I may say as sympathetic with the feeling of those about him, on this occasion, as was Charles Lamb, who, sitting with his sister in the front of the pit, on the night when his farce was damned at its first representation, gave way to the common feeling, and hissed and hooted lustily with the others around him.  It was what might be expected from his honest and truthful nature, sometimes too severe in judging itself.

The commendation bestowed upon Motley’s historical essays in “The North American Review” must have gone far towards compensating him for the ill success of his earlier venture.  It pointed clearly towards the field in which he was to gather his laurels.  And it was in the year following the publication of the first essay, or about that time (1846), that he began collecting materials for a history of Holland.  Whether to tell the story of men that have lived and of events that have happened, or to create the characters and invent the incidents of an imaginary tale be the higher task, we need not stop to discuss.  But the young author was just now like the great actor in Sir Joshua’s picture, between the allurements of Thalia and Melpomene, still doubtful whether he was to be a romancer or a historian.