The last time I saw Mr. Motley was, I believe, about two months before his death, March 28, 1877.  There was no great change in his health, but he complained of indescribable sensations in his nervous system, and felt as if losing the whole power of walking, but this was not obvious in his gait, although he walked shorter distances than before.  I heard no more of him until I was suddenly summoned on the 29th of May into Devonshire to see him.  The telegram I received was so urgent, that I suspected some rupture of a blood- vessel in the brain, and that I should hardly reach him alive; and this was the case.  About two o’clock in the day he complained of a feeling of faintness, said he felt ill and should not recover; and in a few minutes was insensible with symptoms of ingravescent apoplexy.  There was extensive haemorrhage into the brain, as shown by post-mortem examination, the cerebral vessels being atheromatous.  The fatal haemorrhage had occurred into the lateral ventricles, from rupture of one of the middle cerebral arteries.

I am, my dear Sir,
Yours very truly,
William W. Gull.

E.

From the proceedings of the Massachusetts society.

At a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society, held on Thursday, the 14th of June, 1877, after the reading of the records of the preceding meeting, the president, the Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, spoke as follows: 

“Our first thoughts to-day, gentlemen, are of those whom we may not again welcome to these halls.  We shall be in no mood, certainly, for entering on other subjects this morning until we have given some expression to our deep sense of the loss—­the double loss—­which our Society has sustained since our last monthly meeting.”—­[Edmund Quincy died May 17.  John Lothrop Motley died May 29.]

After a most interesting and cordial tribute to his friend, Mr. Quincy, Mr. Winthrop continued: 

“The death of our distinguished associate, Motley, can hardly have taken many of us by surprise.  Sudden at the moment of its occurrence, we had long been more or less prepared for it by his failing health.  It must, indeed, have been quite too evident to those who had seen him, during the last two or three years, that his life-work was finished.  I think he so regarded it himself.

“Hopes may have been occasionally revived in the hearts of his friends, and even in his own heart, that his long-cherished purpose of completing a History of the Thirty Years’ War, as the grand consummation of his historical labors,—­for which all his other volumes seemed to him to have been but the preludes and overtures, —­might still be accomplished.  But