And what work so fitting for the American author as the record of a nation struggling away from the oppression of feudal institutions, which stifled all growth either towards knowledge or civil greatness, throwing off the trammels of religious intolerance, defying the most powerful nation of Christendom, which had breathed an air of bigotry in its long contest with the Moors, and waging an exhaustive war of nearly a century's duration against fearful odds, only to win an independent existence? We had treasured as rare heirlooms the Mechlin laces of our grandmothers, had our favorite sets of Tournay porcelain, awaited with curious and enthusiastic patience our shares in the floral exportations of Harlem, trodden daily the carpetings of Brussels, and esteemed ourselves rich with a fragment of its tapestry, or a rifle of Namur; we had honored the vast manufacturing interest of the Netherlands, their commercial prosperity and noble enterprise; but here all thought of them had ended. Schiller had not taught us that the ancestors of the miners of Mons, the artisans of Brussels, the seamen of Antwerp, the professors of Leyden, were heroes, worthy to stand beside Leonidas and Bozzaris; Strâda had failed to rouse us to enthusiasm at the thought of their long, noble battle for life. Grotius had indeed painted for us with a very Flemish nicety of detail their manners and customs, but had forgotten to round his skeleton of a nation with the passions that animated every stage of its development. It remained for Motley, with all the quick sympathies of an American heart, to rouse our affections and to command our reverence for a people so unfortunate and so brave. It was reserved for him to teach us that William of Orange was not less a martyr to the truth than Huss or Latimer.
It was no common scholar who so worthily finished this task. It was not enough that the intellectual integrity of oar historian was unquestioned, his judgment mature, his knowledge vast and comprehensive. During the years of preparation he had become thoroughly cosmopolite; all the petty prejudices of country and blood had been swept away before the advancing dignity of a reason that became daily more truly and completely the master of itself. All the thousand minute refinements of an extensive and intimate association with the commanding and courtly minds of the age fitted him to cope more successfully with the spirit of subtle intrigue, the fox-like sagacity, the wolfish rapacity, the cruel lack of diplomatic honor, and the illimitable and terrible intolerance that distinguished in so wonderful a degree the historical era of Motley's choice. He came with all the zeal of a true lover of liberty, himself republican, as earth's most cultured sons have been in every age, in thought, habit, and sentiment, to trace for the future and for us the records of a people who were willing to suffer a master, but who revolted from a tyrant; who, with a rare but unappreciated and too nice honor, strove to keep to the yoke that their forefathers had worn, only asking from their ruler the respect and consideration due the faithful servants of his crown, who were no longer the abject slaves of a monarchy, and yet, through an inveterate habit of servitude, were scarcely prepared for the independence of a republic. How nobly he has fulfilled his mission, the hearty applause of two nations sufficiently testifies.
To the wide, comprehensive vision of Motley, history appears in its true light as a science, demanding the assistance of other sciences to the due and harmonious development of all its parts. It relies not more upon the correctness of the recorder's authorities and the profoundness of his researches in the mere region of the events and mutual relation of nations, than upon his universal acquaintance with general literature and the sister arts of politics and philosophy. It was for the treacherous and elegant Bolingbroke to reduce the noble art of Thucydides from the height of sublimity and grandeur to the parlor level of the conversations of the Hotel de Rambouillet, to introduce into the most serious political disquisitions, concerning perhaps the welfare of society, an imperceptible yet carefully elaborated and most effective tone of levity that speedily proved disastrous to their object. It was be who forced the vapid but imposing ceremonial of the bon ton into the records of church and state; who clothed his empty but pompous periods with the ermine of royalty, to ensure them the reverence of a deluded multitude; who stripped Virtue of her ancient prerogatives, and fed her with the crumbs from his table. His polished diction, undeniable talent and fine acquisitions served most unhappily to disguise his real poverty of sentiment, and for a time, at least, diverted the current of popular feeling from the true, beautiful, and reliable in early literature and art, no less than in history. With what success his faulty and imperfect theories were engrafted upon the literature of his nation, the learned and sagacious Schlosser conclusively proves in his History of the Eighteenth Century. Says this ripe scholar and deep thinker, 'All that Bolingbroke ridicules as tedious and without talent, all that he laughs at as useless and without taste, all that which, urged by his labors and those of his like-minded associates, had for eighty years disappeared from ancient history, is again brought back in our day. So short is the triumph of falsehood.' Well may we pervert the verses of Horace,—
'Nullæ placere diu, nec vivere historiæ possunt
Quæ scribuntur aquæ potoribus.'
That was an ungenerous fountain whence Bolingbroke drank even his chilling draughts of inspiration. Splendid, in sooth, as the great Brunnen of the luckless Abderites of Wieland, with its sea-god of marble surrounded by a stately train of nymphs, tritons, and dolphins, from whose jets the water only dripped like tears, because, says the writer, with grave naïveté, 'there was scarcely enough to moisten the lips of a single nymph.' Truly the purple wine of inspiration is as necessary to the historian as to the poet; and if the laughing Bacchus that holds the beaker to the student's eager lips be not clothed in the classic robes of the senate-chamber or the flowing garments of the professor, he wears at least the fawn's dappled hide, and in his hand
'His thyrsus holds—an ivy-crowned spear.'
Does not the gentle Euripides show us the god, 'his horned head with dragon wreath entwined?' And those two sacred horns point back to the dread mysteries of the Ogdoad sublime,
'The great Cabiri of earth's dawning prime.'
They trace with lines that never swerve from truth the history of the primeval world, the early days of Noah and his ark. They recall to us the old story of life and suffering, of deluge and salvation; on their crescent points hangs the eternal principle of the efficacy of sacrifice. They float with the moon-ark of Astarté Mylitta on hyacinthine seas of night-clouds, and their high import, dimmed and lost in the great stream of Time, rises again in the ages, uncrowned with the early luxuriance of symbol and mystery. The mystic horns appear over the brow of the queenly Sappho of Grillparzer, upon whose hair