own share in the contest, and their own influence upon its fortunes.  We do not wonder that his earlier publication has been received as a valuable addition, not only to English, but to European literature.”

One or two other contemporary criticisms may help us with their side lights.  A critic in “The Edinburgh Review” for January, 1861, thinks that “Mr. Motley has not always been successful in keeping the graphic variety of his details subordinate to the main theme of his work.”  Still, he excuses the fault, as he accounts it, in consideration of the new light thrown on various obscure points of history, and—­

“it is atoned for by striking merits, by many narratives of great events faithfully, powerfully, and vividly executed, by the clearest and most life-like conceptions of character, and by a style which, if it sacrifices the severer principles of composition to a desire to be striking and picturesque, is always vigorous, full of animation, and glowing with the genuine enthusiasm of the writer.  Mr. Motley combines as an historian two qualifications seldom found united,—­to great capacity for historical research he adds much power of pictorial representation.  In his pages we find characters and scenes minutely set forth in elaborate and characteristic detail, which is relieved and heightened in effect by the artistic breadth of light and shade thrown across the broader prospects of history.  In an American author, too, we must commend the hearty English spirit in which the book is written; and fertile as the present age has been in historical works of the highest merit, none of them can be ranked above these volumes in the grand qualities of interest, accuracy, and truth.”

A writer in “Blackwood” (May, 1861) contrasts Motley with Froude somewhat in the way in which another critic had contrasted him with Prescott.  Froude, he says, remembers that there are some golden threads in the black robe of the Dominican.  Motley “finds it black and thrusts it farther into the darkness.”

Every writer carries more or less of his own character into his book, of course.  A great professor has told me that there is a personal flavor in the mathematical work of a man of genius like Poisson.  Those who have known Motley and Prescott would feel sure beforehand that the impulsive nature of the one and the judicial serenity of the other would as surely betray themselves in their writings as in their conversation and in their every movement.  Another point which the critic of “Blackwood’s Magazine” has noticed has not been so generally observed:  it is what he calls “a dashing, offhand, rattling style,”—­“fast” writing.  It cannot be denied that here and there may be detected slight vestiges of the way of writing of an earlier period of Motley’s literary life, with which I have no reason to think the writer just mentioned was acquainted.  Now and then I can trace in the turn of a phrase, in the twinkle of an