young man who sees his lofty ideals confronted with the ignoble facts which strew the highways of political life.  But we can recognize real conviction and the deepest feeling beneath his scornful rhetoric and his bitter laugh.  He was no more a mere dilettante than Swift himself, but now and then in the midst of his most serious thought some absurd or grotesque image will obtrude itself, and one is reminded of the lines on the monument of Gay rather than of the fierce epitaph of the Dean of Saint Patrick’s.

VII.

1845-1847.  AEt. 31-33.

First historical and critical essays.—­Peter the great.—­Novels of Balzac.—­Polity of the puritans.

Mr. Motley’s first serious effort in historical composition was an article of fifty pages in “The North American Review” for October, 1845.  This was nominally a notice of two works, one on Russia, the other “A Memoir of the Life of Peter the Great.”  It is, however, a narrative rather than a criticism, a rapid, continuous, brilliant, almost dramatic narrative.  If there had been any question as to whether the young novelist who had missed his first mark had in him the elements which might give him success as an author, this essay would have settled the question.  It shows throughout that the writer has made a thorough study of his subject, but it is written with an easy and abundant, yet scholarly freedom, not as if he were surrounded by his authorities and picking out his material piece by piece, but rather as if it were the overflow of long-pursued and well-remembered studies recalled without effort and poured forth almost as a recreation.

As he betrayed or revealed his personality in his first novel, so in this first effort in another department of literature he showed in epitome his qualities as a historian and a biographer.  The hero of his narrative makes his entrance at once in his character as the shipwright of Saardam, on the occasion of a visit of the great Duke of Marlborough.  The portrait instantly arrests attention.  His ideal personages had been drawn in such a sketchy way, they presented so many imperfectly harmonized features, that they never became real, with the exception, of course, of the story-teller himself.  But the vigor with which the presentment of the imperial ship-carpenter, the sturdy, savage, eager, fiery Peter, was given in the few opening sentences, showed the movement of the hand, the glow of the color, that were in due time to display on a broader canvas the full-length portraits of William the Silent and of John of Barneveld.  The style of the whole article is rich, fluent, picturesque, with light touches of humor here and there, and perhaps a trace or two of youthful jauntiness, not quite as yet outgrown.  His illustrative poetical quotations are mostly from Shakespeare,—­from Milton and Byron also in a passage or two,—­and now and then one is reminded that he is not unfamiliar with Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus” and the “French Revolution” of the same unmistakable writer, more perhaps by the way in which phrases borrowed from other authorities are set in the text than by any more important evidence of unconscious imitation.