John Lothrop Motley. a memoir — Volume 3

The Project Gutenberg Etext of the Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, v3 by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. #13 in our series by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
1874. AEt. 60.
The full title of Mr. Motley's next and last work is The Life and Death of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland; with a View of the Primary Causes and Movements of the Thirty Years' War.
In point of fact this work is a history rather than a biography. It is an interlude, a pause between the acts which were to fill out the complete plan of the Eighty Years' Tragedy, and of which the last act, the Thirty Years' War, remains unwritten. The Life of Barneveld was received as a fitting and worthy continuation of the series of intellectual labor in which he was engaged. I will quote but two general expressions of approval from the two best known British critical reviews. In connection with his previous works, it forms, says The London Quarterly, a fine and continuous story, of which the writer and the nation celebrated by him have equal reason to be proud; a narrative which will remain a prominent ornament of American genius, while it has permanently enriched English literature on this as well as on the other side of the Atlantic.
The Edinburgh Review speaks no less warmly: We can hardly give too much appreciation to that subtile alchemy of the brain which has enabled him to produce out of dull, crabbed, and often illegible state papers, the vivid, graphic, and sparkling narrative which he has given to the world.