spoke of and to me; and the generous manner in which, without the slightest hint from me, and entirely unexpected by me, he attracted the eyes of his hosts of readers to my forthcoming work, by so handsomely alluding to it in the Preface to his own, must be almost as fresh in your memory as it is in mine.

“And although it seems easy enough for a man of world-wide reputation thus to extend the right hand of fellowship to an unknown and struggling aspirant, yet I fear that the history of literature will show that such instances of disinterested kindness are as rare as they are noble.”

It was not from any feeling that Mr. Motley was a young writer from whose rivalry he had nothing to apprehend.  Mr. Amory says that Prescott expressed himself very decidedly to the effect that an author who had written such descriptive passages as were to be found in Mr. Motley’s published writings was not to be undervalued as a competitor by any one.  The reader who will turn to the description of Charles River in the eighth chapter of the second volume of “Merry-Mount,” or of the autumnal woods in the sixteenth chapter of the same volume, will see good reason for Mr. Prescott’s appreciation of the force of the rival whose advent he so heartily and generously welcomed.

X.

1851-1856.  AEt. 37-42.  Historical studies in Europe.-Letter from Brussels.

After working for several years on his projected “History of the Dutch Republic,” he found that, in order to do justice to his subject, he must have recourse to the authorities to be found only in the libraries and state archives of Europe.  In the year 1851 he left America with his family, to begin his task over again, throwing aside all that he had already done, and following up his new course of investigations at Berlin, Dresden, the Hague, and Brussels during several succeeding years.  I do not know that I can give a better idea of his mode of life during this busy period, his occupations, his state of mind, his objects of interest outside of his special work, than by making the following extracts from a long letter to myself, dated Brussels, 20th November, 1853.

After some personal matters he continued:—­

“I don’t really know what to say to you.  I am in a town which, for aught I know, may be very gay.  I don’t know a living soul in it.  We have not a single acquaintance in the place, and we glory in the fact.  There is something rather sublime in thus floating on a single spar in the wide sea of a populous, busy, fuming, fussy world like this.  At any rate it is consonant to both our tastes.  You may suppose, however, that I find it rather difficult to amuse my friends out of the incidents of so isolated an existence.  Our daily career is very regular and monotonous.  Our life is as stagnant as a Dutch canal.  Not that I complain of it,—­on the contrary,