“The early failures of a great writer are like the first sketches of a great artist, and well reward patient study.  More than this, the first efforts of poets and story-tellers are very commonly palimpsests:  beneath the rhymes or the fiction one can almost always spell out the characters which betray the writer’s self.  Take these passages from the story just referred to: 

“’Ah! flattery is a sweet and intoxicating potion, whether we drink it from an earthen ewer or a golden chalice. . . .  Flattery from man to woman is expected:  it is a part of the courtesy of society; but when the divinity descends from the altar to burn incense to the priest, what wonder if the idolater should feel himself transformed into a god!’

   “He had run the risk of being spoiled, but he had a safeguard in his
   aspirations.

“‘My ambitious anticipations,’ says Morton, in the story, were as boundless as they were various and conflicting.  There was not a path which leads to glory in which I was not destined to gather laurels.  As a warrior, I would conquer and overrun the world; as a statesman, I would reorganize and govern it; as a historian, I would consign it all to immortality; and, in my leisure moments, I would be a great poet and a man of the world.’

   “Who can doubt that in this passage of his story he is picturing his
   own visions, one of the fairest of which was destined to become
   reality?

“But there was another element in his character, which those who knew him best recognized as one with which he had to struggle hard, —­that is, a modesty which sometimes tended to collapse into self- distrust.  This, too, betrays itself in the sentences which follow those just quoted:—­

“‘In short,’ says Morton, ’I was already enrolled in that large category of what are called young men of genius, . . . men of whom unheard-of things are expected; till after long preparation comes a portentous failure, and then they are forgotten. . . .  Alas! for the golden imaginations of our youth. . . .  They are all disappointments.  They are bright and beautiful, but they fade.’”

...........................

The President appointed Professor Lowell to write the Memoir of Mr. Quincy, and Dr. Holmes that of Mr. Motley, for the Society’s “Proceedings.”

Professor William Everett then spoke as follows: 

“There is one incident, sir, in Mr. Motley’s career that has not been mentioned to-day, which is, perhaps, most vividly remembered by those of us who were in Europe at the outbreak of our civil war in 1861.  At that time, the ignorance of Englishmen, friendly or otherwise, about America, was infinite:  they knew very little of us, and that little wrong.  Americans were overwhelmed with questions, taunts, threats, misrepresentations,