the world of science, art, letters, politics, and finance mingles in full proportions with the patricians, and on equal terms." His natural diffidence and the sense of loneliness which all men feel on entering a new society soon wore off, and in the course of a few weeks he had become attached to many of the leaders of the London world by ties of friendship and intimacy which lasted to the end of his life.

viewed in these pages, and its niche in the | but an author of the first rank, and as such Temple of Fame is too well known to to find flung open to him all doors of that require any further indication. Suffice it society in which "every illustration from to say, that Motley did not long remain idle; after a few months spent in a journey to Italy, and a short visit to Boston, he returned to his labors among the archives in London and in Holland. "I am almost distraught," he wrote to O. W. Holmes, "at the circumlocution and circumvolutions of London. Sisyphus with his rock was an idle, loafing individual, compared to the martyr who is doomed to work up the precipice of English routine." In He was at this time forty-three years of truth, the work on which he was engaged age, of singularly aristocratic appearance. was a task of no ordinary magnitude; after Lady Byron, who is frequently mentioned the death of William the Silent, the history in these pages, detected in him a strong of Holland merges itself in the history of likeness to her husband. Though by naEurope, and of that mighty war of religion ture an impulsive man, he was reserved which convulsed the civilized world, and in manner, but in congenial society he did not terminate till the peace of West- was a brilliant conversationalist; in poliphalia. This was the goal which Motley tics he was an extreme Liberal, such as in had in view, but which he was destined England would be termed a Radical, and never to reach, and it must ever be a he associated himself chiefly with mem source of regret that we have not his por-bers of the Liberal party, but he regarded traits of Gustavus Adolphus and Wallen- a Radical in the literal sense of the name, stein to place beside those of William of as a man "whose trade is dangerous to Orange, of John of Barneveld, and of Mau- | society." He was a keen partisan, but his rice of Nassau.

The "History of the United Netherlands was now taxing all his energies.

I have much to do in the subterranean way in Brussels, the Hague, London, and Paris. I do not write at all as yet, but I am diving deep and staying under very long, but hoping not to come up too dry. My task is a very large and hard one. My canvas is very broad, and the massing and the composition of the picture will give me more trouble than the more compact one which I have already paint ed. Then I have not got a grand, central, heroic figure, like William the Silent, to give unity and flesh and blood interest to the scene. The history will, I fear, be duller and less dramatic than the other. Nevertheless, there are many grand events and striking characters, if I can do justice to them. If I could write half-a-dozen volumes, with a cheerful confidence that people would read them as easily as I write them, my task would be a comparatively easy one. But I do not know where all the books are to go that are written nowadays. And then my publishers have failed, and Heaven knows what may be the condition of the market when I take my next pigs there. In short, I cannot write at all, except by entirely forgetting for the time that there is such a thing as printing and publishing.

In the early summer of 1858, Motley, leaving his wife and daughters at Nice, came to London, no longer an obscure toiler among archives, dependent on his letters of introduction for acquaintances,

partisanship arose rather from an intense belief in principles than from any narrowminded adherence to political parties or petty details.

During the war, this quality of his mind was exaggerated almost to a bitter intolerance of anything which was associated, or any one who sympathized with, the cause of the South. In that great constitutional convulsion, he could discern nothing but the deadly struggle between the advocates and the opponents of slavery; all the minor issues, which at the time blurred the vision even of his own countrymen, were to him as nothing in view of "the great national disgrace of slavery." It will be seen, later on, that the divergence of opinion between himself and his own father, on this point, was so great as to form a barrier in their familiar intercourse. But no point in his character is more evident, in every page of his correspondence, than his strong affection and power of sympathy. "Though so oppressed by a constitutional melancholy, which grows upon me very rapidly, as to be almost incapacitated from making myself agreeable," we find even at times when his inmost feelings were stirred, and in the letters where he gives most strong expression to those feelings, some touch of playful humor or some grotesque allusion, which shows how near the surface was his kindlier and gentler disposition.

His letters to his wife during the months | eral approbation as I remember in the of May, June, and July, 1858, are a spark- case of any man that in my time has been ling comment on London society; to sum- made a peer." In the following account marize them would be impossible, we can we can trace the inroads which his bodily but give a few extracts taken almost at ailments were making on his health and random from this brilliant panorama. spirits in 1858. Before he had made Thackeray's ac quaintance his heart had warmed to him in consequence of some words of his, overheard at a dinner-party, in high commendation of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. Appreciation of his friend's work was a sure passport to Motley's regard.

I believe you have never seen Thackeray. He has the appearance of a colossal infant, smooth, white, shiny, ringlety hair, flaxen, alas, with advancing years, a roundish face, with a little dab of a nose upon which it is a perpetual wonder how he keeps his spectacles, a sweet but rather piping voice, with something of the childish treble about it, and a very tall, slightly stooping figure-such are the characteristics of the great "snob" of England. His manner is like that of every body else in England-nothing original, all planed down into perfect uniformity with that of his fellow-creatures. There was not much more distinction in his talk than in his white choker or black coat and waistcoat. As you like detail, however, I shall endeavor to Boswellize him a little, but it is very hard work. Something was said of Carlyle the author. Thackeray said, "Carlyle hates everybody that has arrived-if they are on the road, he may perhaps treat them civilly." Mackintosh praised the description in the "French Revolution" of the flight of the king and queen (which is certainly one of the most living pictures ever painted with ink), and Thackeray agreed with him, and spoke of the passages very heartily. Of the Cosmopolitan Club, Thackeray said, "Everybody is or is supposed to be a celebrity; nobody ever says anything worth hearing; and every one goes there with his white choker at midnight, to appear as if he had just been dining with the aristocracy. I have no doubt," he added," "that half of us put on the white cravat after a solitary dinner at home or at our club, and so go down among the Cosmopolitans.'

A few days later he "called at the Russells'," an event worthy of notice simply from the fact, that he then first made the acquaintance of a lady renowned and beloved in English and foreign societies, who was soon to become one of his best friends and most constant correspondents, Lady William Russell.

In 1856, Macaulay had been compelled by failing health to abandon his seat for Edinburgh, and in the following year he had been raised to the peerage with," as he himself has told us, "I think as gen

66

His general appearance is singularly commonplace. I cannot describe him better than

The

by saying he has exactly that kind of face and
figure which by no possibility would be se-
lected, out of even a very small number of
persons, as those of a remarkable personage.
He is of the middle height, neither above nor
below it. The outline of his face in profile is
rather good. The nose, very slightly aquiline,
is well cut, and the expression of the mouth
and chin agreeable. His hair is thin and sil-
very, and he looks a good deal older than
many men of his years for, if I am not mis-
taken, he is just as old as his century, like
Cromwell, Balzac, Charles V., and other no-
torious individuals. Now those two impos-
tors, so far as appearances go, Prescott and
Mignet, who are sixty-two, look young enough,
in comparison, to be Macaulay's sons.
face, to resume my description, seen in front,
is blank, and as it were badly lighted. There
is nothing luminous in the eye, nothing im-
pressive in the brow. The forehead is spa-
cious, but it is scooped entirely away in the
region where benevolence ought to be, while
beyond rise reverence, firmness, and self-es-
teem, like Alps on Alps. The under eyelids
are so swollen as almost to close the eyes, and
it would be quite impossible to tell the color
of those orbs, and equally so, from the neu-
tral tint of his hair and face, to say of what
complexion he had originally been. His voice
is agreeable, and its intonations delightful,
although that is so common a gift with En-
glishmen as to be almost a national character-
istic.

As usual, he took up the ribands of the conversation, and kept them in his own hand, driving wherever it suited him. I believe he is thought by many people a bore, and you remember that Sydney Smith spoke of him as "our Tom, the greatest engine of social oppression in England." I should think he might be to those who wanted to talk also. I can imagine no better fun than to have Carlyle and himself meet accidentally at the same dinner-table with a small company. It would be like two locomotives, each with a long train, coming against each other at express speed. Both, I have no doubt, could be smashed into silence at the first collision. Macaulay, however, is not so dogmatic or so outrageously absurd as Carlyle often is, neither is he half so grotesque or amusing. His whole manner has the smoothness and polished surface of the man of the world, the politician, and the new peer, spread over the

man of letters within. I do not know that I

can repeat any of his conversation, for there was nothing to excite very particular attention in its even flow. There was not a touch of

Holmes's ever-bubbling wit, imagination, en- | Marchioness of Londonderry, and various oththusiasm, and arabesqueness. It is the per- ers, all exceedingly handsome women still. fection of the commonplace, without sparkle | I can hardly remember the names of the many or flash, but at the same time always interest- persons I was presented to. I remember one, ing and agreeable. I could listen to him with a lively, agreeable person, whose name was pleasure for an hour or two every day, and I Lady Edward Thynne, a daughter of Mrs. have no doubt I should thence grow wiser Gore, the novelist. She was apparently a every day, for his brain is full, as hardly any young woman, and I dare say she is capable man's ever was, and his way of delivering of having at this moment ten grandchildren himself is easy and fluent. for aught I know on the contrary.

At Lady Stanley's Motley heard Thack. eray deliver his lecture on George II., and was "much impressed with the quiet graceful ease with which he read — just a few notes above the conversational level talked with me a long time about English polbut never rising to the declamatory. This itics and American matters, saying nothing light-in-hand manner suits well the deli- worth repeating, but conversing always with cate, hovering, rather than superficial an easy, winning, quiet manner, which ac style of the composition." The lecture counts for his great popularity among his

manner.

been brilliant, but his voice is rather shrill

66

is always twisting it about in quite a fabulous | invited himself to meet me at Stirling's, eating up conscientiously nearly the whole of our breakfast, talking all the time; " of Danby Seymour, who in his eagerness to say a pleasant thing to the author of the History of the Dutch Republic," assured him in 1858, that he had read that work eight years before; of Samuel Wilberforce, "altogether too strenuous, too good and too bad for the feeble role of an Anglican bishop; as a cardinal in the days when Rome had power or as a prize-fighter in the great political ring he would have had scope for his energies; " of Mrs. Grote, "despising crinoline and flounces, and attiring himself when going out for a walk in a shawl thrown over her shoulders and tied round her waist, with a poplin gown reaching to the top of her boots, a tall, brown, man's hat with a feather in it, and a stout walking-stick;" of Dean Milman and Sir Roderick Murchison; of Hayward and Disraeli; of the late Duke of Wellington, Professor Owen, and Lord Stratford de Redcliffe; but for all these and a host of others we can only refer our readers to the letters.

66

66

His hair is thick and snow-white and shiny; his head is large and knobby and bumpy, with all kinds of phrenological developments, which I did not have a chance fairly to study. The rugged outlines or headlands of his face are wild and bleak, but not forbidding. Deep furrows of age and thought and toil, perhaps of sorrow, run all over it, while his vast mouth, with a ripple of humor ever playing around it, expands like a placid bay under the huge promontory of his fantastic and incredible nose. His eye is dim and could never have with an unmistakable northern intonation; his manner of speech is fluent, not garrulous, but obviously touched by time; his figure is tall, slender, shambling, awkward, but of course perfectly self-possessed. Such is what remains at eighty of the famous Henry Brougham. The company was too large for general conversation, but every now and then we at our end paused to listen to Brougham and Lyndhurst chaffing each other across the table. Lyndhurst said, Brougham, you disgraced the woolsack by appearing there with those plaid trousers, and with your peer's robe on one occasion put on over your chancellor's gown." "The devil," said Brougham, "you know that to be a calumny; I never wore the plaid trousers. "Well," said Lyndhurst, he confesses the two gowns. Now the present Lord Chancellor never appears except in small clothes and silk stockings." Upon which Lady Stanley observed that the ladies in the gallery all admired Lord Chelmsfording, but the impossibility of scaring up for his handsome leg. "A virtue that was another ghost like William the Silent in never seen in you, Brougham," said Lynd- the second portion of his work sorely ophurst, and so on. I do not repeat these things pressed him; he was despondent about because they are worth recording, but because the result, and found that the strain on I always try to Boswellize a little for your en- his mind, his time, and his resources was greater than he had anticipated. During his month's residence at the Hague, in August, he made the acquaintance of the king and queen of Holland, who not only showed their cordial appreciation of the services he had rendered to their country, but paid him marked attention both on this and on many subsequent occasions.

tertainment.

Space forbids us to continue these extracts. Our readers will find, on turning to the volumes themselves, that the passages we have quoted constitute but a very small portion of the vivid panorama of London society which is here presented to them. We would fain add to our selection the humorous description of the monotonous formality of London dinnerparties, the portraits of Lord John Russell, the plain, quiet, smallish individual in green cutaway coat, large yellow waistcoat and plaid trousers;" of Hallam, who, crippled as he was, retained his intellectual powers unimpaired, "a wreck, but he has not sunk head downwards as you sometimes see, which is the most melancholy termination of a voyage;" of the famous Lady Dufferin, looking as though she might be the sister of her own son; of that "hearty, jolly companion " Monckton Milnes, "the bird of Paradox," "who

The London season over, Mr. Motley, before rejoining his family, returned to Holland to resume his labors among the archives, and his visits to the scenes made memorable by the events he was record

The winter of 1858 and the following spring were passed in Rome, but the intention of proceeding to Venice, for the collection of much important material for the history, was frustrated by the outbreak of the war of Italian independence.

Motley was thus by stress of circumstances, rather than by choice, driven to a second residence in England, which we have the less cause to regret, in that it has yielded us a series of pictures of En. glish and Scottish country life correspond. ing to those of London society which we have already noticed.

At the close of 1860, the first two volumes of the "History of the United Neth

erlands were published, but the future of his offence is tainting every wind of progress of the work was about to be heaven." interrupted by events, which although not unforeseen, were destined to assume such magnitude as the wisest had not antici pated, and which were to constitute a crisis not only in Motley's life, but in the world's history.

The most ardent of Republicans, Motley had for months past been looking forward with the deepest anxiety to the result of the presidential election. "With regard to my views and aspirations," he wrote in March, 1860, "I can only say, that if Seward is not elected (provided he be the candidate) this autumn, good-night, my native land!" Seward, as is well known, was after a close contest beaten for the Republican nomination, and when the news of Abraham Lincoln's election reached Motley in London, he wrote to

his mother:

I

about the matter, saving only that slavery exBut here in Europe nobody knows anything ists. They have no idea that America is a confederation of States, each of which States is competent to establish and abolish slavery at its pleasure, and that the general government has no power to do one or the other. believe everybody in Europe thinks, so far as he thinks at all, most of them contenting themselves with bragging, that the President of the United States could abolish slavery tomorrow by an edict, just as the Emperor of the French abolished the Republic by half-adozen lines of proclamation.

The president, in his inaugural address, said: "I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it now exists; I believe that I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

In Motley's mind the matter is perfectly simple, and he can brook no wavering or

Although I have felt little doubt as to the result for months past, yet as I was so intensely anxious for the success of the Repub-weighing of arguments in others; no mat lican cause, I was on tenterhooks till I actu- ter that the main question was confused ally knew the result. I rejoice in the triumph by a score of side issues; that even in at last of freedom over slavery more than I the Northern States, there were men who can express. Thank God, it can no longer be took a different view; that, by his own said, after the great verdict just pronounced, admission, great ignorance prevailed in that the common law of my country is slavery, Europe concerning American politics and and that the American flag carries slavery with institutions. He had no patience with it wherever it goes! any one who disagreed with him; he cannot bear to think that the South should have any well-wishers in England; for him, throughout the war there seems scarce any pity for Southerners even in their sorest straits; for him Lee and Davis, the general and the statesman, seem entirely lost in Lee and Davis the rebels.

At this moment war was discussed only as a possible contingency, but before the new president could actually enter upon his office those four fatal months must elapse, in which the weakness and vacillation of Buchanan and the corruption of his cabinet were to accelerate so much the march of events; even in Lincoln's inaugural address war was not regarded as inevitable, but before he had been a month at the White House the first shot at Fort Sumter had ushered in that struggle which is only now beginning to assume its true historical perspective.

To enter into any discussion of the American Civil War, save in so far as may be necessary in dealing with the subsequent years of Mr. Motley's life, would be out of place on the present occasion. For the time all else is banished from his mind; when eight years previously "Uncle Tom's Cabin " was moving the heart of Europe against slavery, Motley had written, "The only way the curse is ever to be taken from the nation is by creating such an atmosphere all round the Slave States, that a slaveholder may not be able to thrust his nose outside his own door without scenting that the rankness

The Liberal government in England had recognized the South as a belligerent power; this step was taken in no spirit of hostility to the North, but it raised a storm of resentment among the Federals as being a form of moral support, which, apart from any material aid, might suffice to turn the scale. Motley was torn asunder, by his growing affection for England and the English on one hand, and his passionate devotion to his native land and her cause on the other. Among leading English statesmen there were many who shared his views, but the popular voice, and there was reason to believe even the government, inclined to the other side.

In a recently published American work we read, "Miss Martineau, who had been received with open arms in Boston, was socially ostracized by the same sympathy with the anti-slavery party." (Men and society as soon as she was known to be in pronounced Manners of Half a Century. By Hugh McCulloch.)