“I don’t know whether my last two volumes are good or bad; I only
     know that they are true—­but that need n’t make them amusing.

     “Alas! one never knows when one becomes a bore.”

In 1868 the two concluding volumes of the “History of the Netherlands” were published at the same time in London and in New York.  The events described and the characters delineated in these two volumes had, perhaps, less peculiar interest for English and American readers than some of those which had lent attraction to the preceding ones.  There was no scene like the siege of Antwerp, no story like that of the Spanish Armada.  There were no names that sounded to our ears like those of Sir Philip Sidney and Leicester and Amy Robsart.  But the main course of his narrative flowed on with the same breadth and depth of learning and the same brilliancy of expression.  The monumental work continued as nobly as it had begun.  The facts had been slowly, quietly gathered, one by one, like pebbles from the empty channel of a brook.  The style was fluent, impetuous, abundant, impatient, as it were, at times, and leaping the sober boundaries prescribed to it, like the torrent which rushes through the same channel when the rains have filled it.  Thus there was matter for criticism in his use of language.  He was not always careful in the construction of his sentences.  He introduced expressions now and then into his vocabulary which reminded one of his earlier literary efforts.  He used stronger language at times than was necessary, coloring too highly, shading too deeply in his pictorial delineations.  To come to the matter of his narrative, it must be granted that not every reader will care to follow him through all the details of diplomatic intrigues which he has with such industry and sagacity extricated from the old manuscripts in which they had long lain hidden.  But we turn a few pages and we come to one of those descriptions which arrest us at once and show him in his power and brilliancy as a literary artist.  His characters move before us with the features of life; we can see Elizabeth, or Philip, or Maurice, not as a name connected with events, but as a breathing and acting human being, to be loved or hated, admired or despised, as if he or she were our contemporary.  That all his judgments would not be accepted as final we might easily anticipate; he could not help writing more or less as a partisan, but he was a partisan on the side of freedom in politics and religion, of human nature as against every form of tyranny, secular or priestly, of noble manhood wherever he saw it as against meanness and violence and imposture, whether clad in the soldier’s mail or the emperor’s purple.  His sternest critics, and even these admiring ones, were yet to be found among those who with fundamental beliefs at variance with his own followed him in his long researches among the dusty annals of the past.

The work of the learned M. Groen van Prinsterer,—­[Maurice et Barnevelt, Etude Historique.  Utrecht, 1875.]—­devoted expressly to the revision and correction of what the author considers the erroneous views of Mr. Motley on certain important points, bears, notwithstanding, such sincere and hearty tribute to his industry, his acquisitions, his brilliant qualities as a historian, that some extracts from it will be read, I think, with interest.