for the purpose of reading these documents.  There are many letters of Philip II. there, with apostilles by his own hand. . . .  I would add that I am going to pass this summer at Venice for the purpose of reading and procuring copies from the very rich archives of that Republic, of the correspondence of their envoys in Madrid, London, and Brussels during the epoch of which I am treating.

     I am also not without hope of gaining access to the archives of the
     Vatican here, although there are some difficulties in the way.

                         With kind regards . . . 
                                   I remain very truly yours,
                                                  J. L. Motley.

XV.

1860.  At. 46.

Publication of the first two volumes of the “History of the united Netherlands.”—­Their reception.

We know something of the manner in which Mr. Motley collected his materials.  We know the labors, the difficulties, the cost of his toils among the dusty records of the past.  What he gained by the years he spent in his researches is so well stated by himself that I shall borrow his own words:—­

“Thanks to the liberality of many modern governments of Europe, the archives where the state secrets of the buried centuries have so long mouldered are now open to the student of history.  To him who has patience and industry, many mysteries are thus revealed which no political sagacity or critical acumen could have divined.  He leans over the shoulder of Philip the Second at his writing-table, as the King spells patiently out, with cipher-key in hand, the most concealed hieroglyphics of Parma, or Guise, or Mendoza.  He reads the secret thoughts of ‘Fabius’ [Philip II.] as that cunctative Roman scrawls his marginal apostilles on each dispatch; he pries into all the stratagems of Camillus, Hortensius, Mucius, Julius, Tullius, and the rest of those ancient heroes who lent their names to the diplomatic masqueraders of the sixteenth century; he enters the cabinet of the deeply pondering Burghley, and takes from the most private drawer the memoranda which record that minister’s unutterable doubtings; he pulls from the dressing-gown folds of the stealthy, soft-gliding Walsingham the last secret which he has picked from the Emperor’s pigeon-holes or the Pope’s pocket, and which not Hatton, nor Buckhurst, nor Leicester, nor the Lord Treasurer is to see,—­nobody but Elizabeth herself; he sits invisible at the most secret councils of the Nassaus and Barneveld and Buys, or pores with Farnese over coming victories and vast schemes of universal conquest; he reads the latest bit of scandal, the minutest characteristic of king or minister, chronicled by the gossiping Venetians for the edification of the Forty; and after