Once more, we cannot fail to see that just as astrology has given place

to astronomy, so theology, the science of Him whom by searching no man

can find out, is fast being replaced by what we may not improperly call

theonomy, or the science of the laws according to which the Creator acts.

And since these laws find their fullest manifestations for us, at least,

in rational human natures, the study of anthropology is largely replacing

that of scholastic divinity. We must contemplate our Maker indirectly in

human attributes as we talk of Him in human parts of speech. And this

gives a sacredness to the study of man in his physical, mental, moral,

social, and religious nature which elevates the faithful students of

anthropology to the dignity of a priesthood, and sheds a holy light on

the recorded results of their labors, brought together as they are in

such a collection as this which is now spread out before us.

Thus, then, our library is a temple as truly as the dome-crowned

cathedral hallowed by the breath of prayer and praise, where the dead

repose and the living worship. May it, with all its treasures, be

consecrated like that to the glory of God, through the contributions it

shall make to the advancement of sound knowledge, to the relief of human

suffering, to the promotion of harmonious relations between the members

of the two noble professions which deal with the diseases of the soul and

with those of the body, and to the common cause in which all good men are

working, the furtherance of the well-being of their fellow-creatures!

NOTE.--As an illustration of the statement in the last paragraph but one,

I take the following notice from the "Boston Daily Advertiser," of

December 4th, the day after the delivery of the address: "Prince Lucien

Bonaparte is now living in London, and is devoting himself to the work of

collecting the creeds of all religions and sects, with a view to their

classification,--his object being simply scientific or anthropological."

Since delivering the address, also, I find a leading article in the

"Cincinnati Lancet and Clinic" of November 30th, headed "The Decadence of

Homoeopathy," abundantly illustrated by extracts from the "Homoeopathic

Times," the leading American organ of that sect.

In the New York "Medical Record" of the same date, which I had not seen

before the delivery of my address, is an account of the action of the

Homoeopathic Medical Society of Northern New York, in which Hahnemann's

theory of "dynamization" is characterized in a formal resolve as

"unworthy the confidence of the Homoeopathic profession."

It will be a disappointment to the German Homoeopathists to read in the

"Homoeopathic Times" such a statement as the following: "Whatever the

influences have been which have checked the outward development of

Homoeopathy, it is plainly evident that the Homoeopathic school, as

regards the number of its openly avowed representatives, has attained its

majority, and has begun to decline both in this country and in England."

All which is an additional reason for making a collection of the

incredibly curious literature of Homoeopathy before that pseudological

inanity has faded out like so many other delusions.

SOME OF MY EARLY TEACHERS

[A Farewell Address to the Medical School of Harvard University, November

28, 1882.]

I had intended that the recitation of Friday last should be followed by a

few parting words to my class and any friends who might happen to be in

the lecture-room. But I learned on the preceding evening that there was

an expectation, a desire, that my farewell should take a somewhat

different form; and not to disappoint the wishes of those whom I was

anxious to gratify, I made up my mind to appear before you with such

hasty preparation as the scanty time admitted.

There are three occasions upon which a human being has a right to

consider himself as a centre of interest to those about him: when he is

christened, when he is married, and when he is buried. Every one is the

chief personage, the hero, of his own baptism, his own wedding, and his

own funeral.

There are other occasions, less momentous, in which one may make more of

himself than under ordinary circumstances he would think it proper to do;

when he may talk about himself, and tell his own experiences, in fact,

indulge in a more or less egotistic monologue without fear or reproach.

I think I may claim that this is one of those occasions. I have

delivered my last anatomical lecture and heard my class recite for the

last time. They wish to hear from me again in a less scholastic mood

than that in which they have known me. Will you not indulge me in

telling you something of my own story?

This is the thirty-sixth Course of Lectures in which I have taken my

place and performed my duties as Professor of Anatomy. For more than

half of my term of office I gave instruction in Physiology, after the

fashion of my predecessors and in the manner then generally prevalent in

our schools, where the physiological laboratory was not a necessary part

of the apparatus of instruction. It was with my hearty approval that the

teaching of Physiology was constituted a separate department and made an

independent Professorship. Before my time, Dr. Warren had taught

Anatomy, Physiology, and Surgery in the same course of Lectures, lasting

only three or four months. As the boundaries of science are enlarged,

new divisions and subdivisions of its territories become necessary. In

the place of six Professors in 1847, when I first became a member of the

Faculty, I count twelve upon the Catalogue before me, and I find the

whole number engaged in the work of instruction in the Medical School

amounts to no less than fifty.

Since I began teaching in this school, the aspect of many branches of

science has undergone a very remarkable transformation. Chemistry and

Physiology are no longer what they were, as taught by the instructors of

that time. We are looking forward to the synthesis of new organic

compounds; our artificial madder is already in the market, and the

indigo-raisers are now fearing that their crop will be supplanted by the

manufactured article. In the living body we talk of fuel supplied and

work done, in movement, in heat, just as if we were dealing with a

machine of our own contrivance.

A physiological laboratory of to-day is equipped with instruments of

research of such ingenious contrivance, such elaborate construction, that

one might suppose himself in a workshop where some exquisite fabric was

to be wrought, such as Queens love to wear, and Kings do not always love

to pay for. They are, indeed, weaving a charmed web, for these are the

looms from which comes the knowledge that clothes the nakedness of the

intellect. Here are the mills that grind food for its hunger, and "is

not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?"

But while many of the sciences have so changed that the teachers of the

past would hardly know them, it has not been so with the branch I teach,

or, rather, with that division of it which is chiefly taught in this

amphitheatre. General anatomy, or histology, on the other hand, is

almost all new; it has grown up, mainly, since I began my medical

studies. I never saw a compound microscope during my years of study in

Paris. Individuals had begun to use the instrument, but I never heard it

alluded to by either Professors or students. In descriptive anatomy I

have found little to unlearn, and not a great deal that was both new and

important to learn. Trifling additions are made from year to year, not

to be despised and not to be overvalued. Some of the older anatomical

works are still admirable, some of the newer ones very much the contrary.

I have had recent anatomical plates brought me for inspection, and I have

actually button-holed the book-agent, a being commonly as hard to get rid

of as the tar-baby in the negro legend, that I might put him to shame

with the imperial illustrations of the bones and muscles in the great

folio of Albinus, published in 1747, and the unapproached figures of the

lymphatic system of Mascagni, now within a very few years of a century

old, and still copied, or, rather, pretended to be copied, in the most

recent works on anatomy.

I am afraid that it is a good plan to get rid of old Professors, and I am

thankful to hear that there is a movement for making provision for those

who are left in need when they lose their offices and their salaries. I

remember one of our ancient Cambridge Doctors once asked me to get into

his rickety chaise, and said to me, half humorously, half sadly, that he

was like an old horse,--they had taken off his saddle and turned him out

to pasture. I fear the grass was pretty short where that old servant of

the public found himself grazing. If I myself needed an apology for

holding my office so long, I should find it in the fact that human

anatomy is much the same study that it was in the days of Vesalius and

Fallopius, and that the greater part of my teaching was of such a nature

that it could never become antiquated.

Let me begin with my first experience as a medical student. I had come

from the lessons of Judge Story and Mr. Ashmun in the Law School at

Cambridge. I had been busy, more or less, with the pages of Blackstone

and Chitty, and other text-books of the first year of legal study. More

or less, I say, but I am afraid it was less rather than more. For during

that year I first tasted the intoxicating pleasure of authorship. A

college periodical, conducted by friends of mine, still undergraduates,

tempted me into print, and there is no form of lead-poisoning which more

rapidly and thoroughly pervades the blood and bones and marrow than that

which reaches the young author through mental contact with type-metal.

Qui a bu, boira,--he who has once been a drinker will drink again, says

the French proverb. So the man or woman who has tasted type is sure to

return to his old indulgence sooner or later. In that fatal year I had

my first attack of authors' lead-poisoning, and I have never got quite

rid of it from that day to this. But for that I might have applied

myself more diligently to my legal studies, and carried a green bag in

place of a stethoscope and a thermometer up to the present day.

What determined me to give up Law and apply myself to Medicine I can

hardly say, but I had from the first looked upon that year's study as an

experiment. At any rate, I made the change, and soon found myself

introduced to new scenes and new companionships.

I can scarcely credit my memory when I recall the first impressions

produced upon me by sights afterwards become so familiar that they could

no more disturb a pulse-beat than the commonest of every-day experiences.

The skeleton, hung aloft like a gibbeted criminal, looked grimly at me as

I entered the room devoted to the students of the school I had joined,

just as the fleshless figure of Time, with the hour-glass and scythe,

used to glare upon me in my childhood from the "New England Primer." The

white faces in the beds at the Hospital found their reflection in my own

cheeks, which lost their color as I looked upon them. All this had to

pass away in a little time; I had chosen my profession, and must meet its

painful and repulsive aspects until they lost their power over my

sensibilities.

The private medical school which I had joined was one established by Dr.

James Jackson, Dr. Walter Channing, Dr. John Ware, Dr. Winslow Lewis, and

Dr. George W. Otis. Of the first three gentlemen I have either spoken

elsewhere or may find occasion to speak hereafter. The two younger

members of this association of teachers were both graduates of our

University, one of the year 1819, the other of 1818.

Dr. Lewis was a great favorite with students. He was a man of very

lively temperament, fond of old books and young people, open-hearted,

free-spoken, an enthusiast in teaching, and especially at home in that

apartment of the temple of science where nature is seen in undress, the

anthropotomic laboratory, known to common speech as the dissecting-room.

He had that quality which is the special gift of the man born for a

teacher,--the power of exciting an interest in that which he taught.

While he was present the apartment I speak of was the sunniest of studios

in spite of its mortuary spectacles. Of the students I met there I best

remember James Jackson, Junior, full of zeal and playful as a boy, a

young man whose early death was a calamity to the profession of which he

promised to be a chief ornament; the late Reverend J. S. C. Greene, who,

as the prefix to his name signifies, afterwards changed his profession,

but one of whose dissections I remember looking upon with admiration; and

my friend Mr. Charles Amory, as we call him, Dr. Charles Amory, as he is

entitled to be called, then, as now and always, a favorite with all about

him. He had come to us from the schools of Germany, and brought with him

recollections of the teachings of Blumenbach and the elder Langenbeck,

father of him whose portrait hangs in our Museum. Dr. Lewis was our

companion as well as our teacher. A good demonstrator is,--I will not

say as important as a good Professor in the teaching of Anatomy, because

I am not sure that he is not more important. He comes into direct

personal relations with the students,--he is one of them, in fact, as the

Professor cannot be from the nature of his duties. The Professor's chair

is an insulating stool, so to speak; his age, his knowledge, real or

supposed, his official station, are like the glass legs which support the

electrician's piece of furniture, and cut it off from the common currents

of the floor upon which it stands. Dr. Lewis enjoyed teaching and made

his students enjoy being taught. He delighted in those anatomical

conundrums to answer which keeps the student's eyes open and his wits

awake. He was happy as he dexterously performed the tour de maitre of

the old barber-surgeons, or applied the spica bandage and taught his

scholars to do it, so neatly and symmetrically that the aesthetic

missionary from the older centre of civilization would bend over it in

blissful contemplation, as if it were a sunflower. Dr. Lewis had many

other tastes, and was a favorite, not only with students, but in a wide

circle, professional, antiquarian, masonic, and social.

Dr. Otis was less widely known, but was a fluent and agreeable lecturer,

and esteemed as a good surgeon.

I must content myself with this glimpse at myself and a few of my

fellow-students in Boston. After attending two courses of Lectures in

the school of the University, I went to Europe to continue my studies.

You may like to hear something of the famous Professors of Paris in the

days when I was a student in the Ecole de Medicine, and following the

great Hospital teachers.

I can hardly believe my own memory when I recall the old practitioners

and Professors who were still going round the hospitals when I mingled

with the train of students that attended the morning visits. See that

bent old man who is groping his way through the wards of La Charity.

That is the famous Baron Boyer, author of the great work on surgery in

nine volumes, a writer whose clearness of style commends his treatise to

general admiration, and makes it a kind of classic. He slashes away at a

terrible rate, they say, when he gets hold of the subject of fistula in

its most frequent habitat,--but I never saw him do more than look as if

he wanted to cut a good dollop out of a patient he was examining. The

short, square, substantial man with iron-gray hair, ruddy face, and white

apron is Baron Larrey, Napoleon's favorite surgeon, the most honest man

he ever saw,--it is reputed that he called him. To go round the Hotel

des Invalides with Larrey was to live over the campaigns of Napoleon, to

look on the sun of Austerlitz, to hear the cannons of Marengo, to

struggle through the icy waters of the Beresina, to shiver in the snows

of the Russian retreat, and to gaze through the battle smoke upon the

last charge of the red lancers on the redder field of Waterloo. Larrey

was still strong and sturdy as I saw him, and few portraits remain

printed in livelier colors on the tablet of my memory.

Leave the little group of students which gathers about Larrey beneath the

gilded dome of the Invalides and follow me to the Hotel Dieu, where rules

and reigns the master-surgeon of his day, at least so far as Paris and

France are concerned,--the illustrious Baron Dupuytren. No man disputed

his reign, some envied his supremacy. Lisfranc shrugged his shoulders as

he spoke of "ce grand homme de l'autre cots de la riviere," that great

man on the other side of the river, but the great man he remained, until

he bowed before the mandate which none may disobey. "Three times," said

Bouillaud, "did the apoplectic thunderbolt fall on that robust

brain,"--it yielded at last as the old bald cliff that is riven and

crashes down into the valley. I saw him before the first thunderbolt had

descended: a square, solid man, with a high and full-domed head, oracular

in his utterances, indifferent to those around him, sometimes, it was

said, very rough with them. He spoke in low, even tones, with quiet

fluency, and was listened to with that hush of rapt attention which I

have hardly seen in any circle of listeners unless when such men as

ex-President John Quincy Adams or Daniel Webster were the speakers. I do

not think that Dupuytren has left a record which explains his influence,

but in point of fact he dominated those around him in a remarkable

manner. You must have all witnessed something of the same kind. The

personal presence of some men carries command with it, and their accents

silence the crowd around them, when the same words from other lips might

fall comparatively unheeded.

As for Lisfranc, I can say little more of him than that he was a great

drawer of blood and hewer of members. I remember his ordering a

wholesale bleeding of his patients, right and left, whatever might be the

matter with them, one morning when a phlebotomizing fit was on him. I

recollect his regretting the splendid guardsmen of the old Empire,--for

what? because they had such magnificent thighs to amputate. I got along

about as far as that with him, when I ceased to be a follower of M.

Lisfranc.

The name of Velpeau must have reached many of you, for he died in 1867,

and his many works made his name widely known. Coming to Paris in wooden

shoes, starving, almost, at first, he raised himself to great eminence as

a surgeon and as an author, and at last obtained the Professorship to

which his talents and learning entitled him. His example may be an

encouragement to some of my younger hearers who are born, not with the

silver spoon in their mouths, but with the two-tined iron fork in their

hands. It is a poor thing to take up their milk porridge with in their

young days, but in after years it will often transfix the solid dumplings

that roll out of the silver spoon. So Velpeau found it. He had not what

is called genius, he was far from prepossessing in aspect, looking as if

he might have wielded the sledge-hammer (as I think he had done in early

life) rather than the lancet, but he had industry, determination,

intelligence, character, and he made his way to distinction and

prosperity, as some of you sitting on these benches and wondering

anxiously what is to become of you in the struggle for life will have

done before the twentieth century has got halfway through its first

quarter. A good sound head over a pair of wooden shoes is a great deal

better than a wooden head belonging to an owner who cases his feet in

calf-skin, but a good brain is not enough without a stout heart to fill

the four great conduits which carry at once fuel and fire to that

mightiest of engines.

How many of you who are before me are familiarly acquainted with the name

of Broussais, or even with that of Andral? Both were lecturing at the

Ecole de Medicine, and I often heard them. Broussais was in those days

like an old volcano, which has pretty nearly used up its fire and

brimstone, but is still boiling and bubbling in its interior, and now and

then sends up a spirt of lava and a volley of pebbles. His theories of

gastro-enteritis, of irritation and inflammation as the cause of disease,

and the practice which sprang from them, ran over the fields of medicine

for a time like flame over the grass of the prairies. The way in which

that knotty-featured, savage old man would bring out the word

irritation--with rattling and rolling reduplication of the resonant

letter r--might have taught a lesson in articulation to Salvini. But

Broussais's theory was languishing and well-nigh become obsolete, and

this, no doubt, added vehemence to his defence of his cherished dogmas.

Old theories, and old men who cling to them, must take themselves out of

the way as the new generation with its fresh thoughts and altered habits

of mind comes forward to take the place of that which is dying out. This

was a truth which the fiery old theorist found it very hard to learn, and

harder to bear, as it was forced upon him. For the hour of his lecture

was succeeded by that of a younger and far more popular professor. As

his lecture drew towards its close, the benches, thinly sprinkled with

students, began to fill up; the doors creaked open and banged back

oftener and oftener, until at last the sound grew almost continuous, and

the voice of the lecturer became a leonine growl as he strove in vain to

be heard over the noise of doors and footsteps.

Broussais was now sixty-two years old. The new generation had outgrown

his doctrines, and the Professor for whose hour the benches had filled

themselves belonged to that new generation. Gabriel Andral was little

more than half the age of Broussais, in the full prime and vigor of

manhood at thirty-seven years. He was a rapid, fluent, fervid, and

imaginative speaker, pleasing in aspect and manner,--a strong contrast to

the harsh, vituperative old man who had just preceded him. His Clinique

Medicale is still valuable as a collection of cases, and his researches

on the blood, conducted in association with Gavarret, contributed new and

valuable facts to science. But I remember him chiefly as one of those

instructors whose natural eloquence made it delightful to listen to him.

I doubt if I or my fellow-students did full justice either to him or to

the famous physician of Hotel Dieu, Chomel. We had addicted ourselves

almost too closely to the words of another master, by whom we were ready

to swear as against all teachers that ever were or ever would be.

This object of our reverence, I might almost say idolatry, was one whose

name is well known to most of the young men before me, even to those who

may know comparatively little of his works and teachings. Pierre Charles

Alexandre Louis, at the age of forty-seven, as I recall him, was a tall,

rather spare, dignified personage, of serene and grave aspect, but with a

pleasant smile and kindly voice for the student with whom he came into

personal relations. If I summed up the lessons of Louis in two

expressions, they would be these; I do not hold him answerable for the

words, but I will condense them after my own fashion in French, and then

give them to you, expanded somewhat, in English:

Formez toujours des idees nettes.

Fuyez toujours les a peu pres.

Always make sure that you form a distinct and clear idea of the matter

you are considering.

Always avoid vague approximations where exact estimates are possible;

about so many,--about so much, instead of the precise number and

quantity.

Now, if there is anything on which the biological sciences have prided

themselves in these latter years it is the substitution of quantitative

for qualitative formulae. The "numerical system," of which Louis was the

great advocate, if not the absolute originator, was an attempt to

substitute series of carefully recorded facts, rigidly counted and

closely compared, for those never-ending records of vague, unverifiable

conclusions with which the classics of the healing art were overloaded.

The history of practical medicine had been like the story of the

Danaides. "Experience" had been, from time immemorial, pouring its

flowing treasures into buckets full of holes. At the existing rate of

supply and leakage they would never be filled; nothing would ever be

settled in medicine. But cases thoroughly recorded and mathematically

analyzed would always be available for future use, and when accumulated

in sufficient number would lead to results which would be trustworthy,

and belong to science.

You young men who are following the hospitals hardly know how much you

are indebted to Louis. I say nothing of his Researches on Phthisis or

his great work on Typhoid Fever. But I consider his modest and brief

Essay on Bleeding in some Inflammatory Diseases, based on cases carefully

observed and numerically analyzed, one of the most important written

contributions to practical medicine, to the treatment of internal

disease, of this century, if not since the days of Sydenham. The lancet

was the magician's wand of the dark ages of medicine. The old physicians

not only believed in its general efficacy as a wonder-worker in disease,

but they believed that each malady could be successfully attacked from

some special part of the body,--the strategic point which commanded the

seat of the morbid affection. On a figure given in the curious old work

of John de Ketam, no less than thirty-eight separate places are marked as

the proper ones to bleed from, in different diseases. Even Louis, who

had not wholly given up venesection, used now and then to order that a

patient suffering from headache should be bled in the foot, in preference

to any other part.

But what Louis did was this: he showed by a strict analysis of numerous

cases that bleeding did not strangle,--jugulate was the word then

used,--acute diseases, more especially pneumonia. This was not a

reform,--it was a revolution. It was followed up in this country by the

remarkable Discourse of Dr. Jacob Bigelow upon Self-Limited Diseases,

which has, I believe, done more than any other work or essay in our own

language to rescue the practice of medicine from the slavery to the

drugging system which was a part of the inheritance of the profession.

Yes, I say, as I look back on the long hours of the many days I spent in

the wards and in the autopsy room of La Pitie, where Louis was one of the

attending physicians,--yes, Louis did a great work for practical

medicine. Modest in the presence of nature, fearless in the face of

authority, unwearying in the pursuit of truth, he was a man whom any

student might be happy and proud to claim as his teacher and his friend,

and yet, as I look back on the days when I followed his teachings, I feel

that I gave myself up too exclusively to his methods of thought and

study.

There is one part of their business which certain medical practitioners

are too apt to forget; namely, that what they should most of all try to

do is to ward off disease, to alleviate suffering, to preserve life, or

at least to prolong it if possible. It is not of the slightest interest

to the patient to know whether three or three and a quarter cubic inches

of his lung are hepatized. His mind is not occupied with thinking of the

curious problems which are to be solved by his own autopsy,--whether this

or that strand of the spinal marrow is the seat of this or that form of

degeneration. He wants something to relieve his pain, to mitigate the

anguish of dyspnea, to bring back motion and sensibility to the dead

limb, to still the tortures of neuralgia. What is it to him that you can

localize and name by some uncouth term the disease which you could not

prevent and which you cannot cure? An old woman who knows how to make a

poultice and how to put it on, and does it tuto, eito, jucunde, just when

and where it is wanted, is better,--a thousand times better in many

cases,--than a staring pathologist, who explores and thumps and doubts

and guesses, and tells his patient be will be better tomorrow, and so

goes home to tumble his books over and make out a diagnosis.

But in those days, I, like most of my fellow students, was thinking much

more of "science" than of practical medicine, and I believe if we had not

clung so closely to the skirts of Louis and had followed some of the

courses of men like Trousseau,--therapeutists, who gave special attention

to curative methods, and not chiefly to diagnosis,--it would have been

better for me and others. One thing, at any rate, we did learn in the

wards of Louis. We learned that a very large proportion of diseases get

well of themselves, without any special medication,--the great fact

formulated, enforced, and popularized by Dr. Jacob Bigelow in the

Discourse referred to. We unlearned the habit of drugging for its own

sake. This detestable practice, which I was almost proscribed for

condemning somewhat too epigrammatically a little more than twenty years

ago, came to us, I suspect, in a considerable measure from the English

"general practitioners," a sort of prescribing apothecaries. You

remember how, when the city was besieged, each artisan who was called

upon in council to suggest the best means of defence recommended the

articles he dealt in: the carpenter, wood; the blacksmith, iron; the

mason, brick; until it came to be a puzzle to know which to adopt. Then

the shoemaker said, "Hang your walls with new boots," and gave good

reasons why these should be the best of all possible defences. Now the

"general practitioner" charged, as I understand, for his medicine, and

in that way got paid for his visit. Wherever this is the practice,

medicine is sure to become a trade, and the people learn to expect

drugging, and to consider it necessary, because drugs are so universally

given to the patients of the man who gets his living by them.

It was something to have unlearned the pernicious habit of constantly

giving poisons to a patient, as if they were good in themselves, of

drawing off the blood which he would want in his struggle with disease,

of making him sore and wretched with needless blisters, of turning his

stomach with unnecessary nauseous draught and mixtures,--only because he

was sick and something must be done. But there were positive as well as

negative facts to be learned, and some of us, I fear, came home rich in

the negatives of the expectant practice, poor in the resources which many

a plain country practitioner had ready in abundance for the relief and

the cure of disease. No one instructor can be expected to do all for a

student which he requires. Louis taught us who followed him the love of

truth, the habit of passionless listening to the teachings of nature, the

most careful and searching methods of observation, and the sure means of

getting at the results to be obtained from them in the constant

employment of accurate tabulation. He was not a showy, or eloquent, or,

I should say, a very generally popular man, though the favorite, almost

the idol, of many students, especially Genevese and Bostonians. But he

was a man of lofty and admirable scientific character, and his work will

endure in its influences long after his name is lost sight of save to the

faded eyes of the student of medical literature.

Many other names of men more or less famous in their day, and who were

teaching while I was in Paris, come up before me. They are but empty

sounds for the most part in the ears of persons of not more than middle

age. Who of you knows anything of Richerand, author of a very popular

work on Physiology, commonly put into the student's hands when I first

began to ask for medical text-books? I heard him lecture once, and have

had his image with me ever since as that of an old, worn-out man,--a

venerable but dilapidated relic of an effete antiquity. To verify this

impression I have just looked out the dates of his birth and death, and

find that he was eighteen years younger than the speaker who is now

addressing you. There is a terrible parallax between the period before

thirty and that after threescore and ten, as two men of those ages look,

one with naked eyes, one through his spectacles, at the man of fifty and

thereabout. Magendie, I doubt not you have all heard of. I attended but

one of his lectures. I question if one here, unless some contemporary of

my own has strayed into the amphitheatre,--knows anything about Marjolin.

I remember two things about his lectures on surgery, the deep tones of

his voice as he referred to his oracle,--the earlier writer, Jean Louis

Petit,--and his formidable snuffbox. What he taught me lies far down, I

doubt not, among the roots of my knowledge, but it does not flower out in

any noticeable blossoms, or offer me any very obvious fruits. Where now

is the fame of Bouillaud, Professor and Deputy, the Sangrado of his time?

Where is the renown of Piorry, percussionist and poet, expert alike in

the resonances of the thoracic cavity and those of the rhyming

vocabulary?--I think life has not yet done with the vivacious Ricord,

whom I remember calling the Voltaire of pelvic literature,--a sceptic as

to the morality of the race in general, who would have submitted Diana to

treatment with his mineral specifics, and ordered a course of blue pills

for the vestal virgins.

Ricord was born at the beginning of the century, and Piorry some years

earlier. Cruveilhier, who died in 1874, is still remembered by his great

work on pathological anatomy; his work on descriptive anatomy has some

things which I look in vain for elsewhere. But where is Civiale,--where

are Orfila, Gendrin, Rostan, Biett, Alibert,--jolly old Baron Alibert,

whom I remember so well in his broad-brimmed hat, worn a little jauntily

on one side, calling out to the students in the court-yard of the

Hospital St. Louis, "Enfans de la methode naturelle, etes-vous tous

ici?" "Children of the natural method [his own method of classification

of skin diseases,] are you all here?" All here, then, perhaps; all

where, now?

My show of ghosts is over. It is always the same story that old men tell

to younger ones, some few of whom will in their turn repeat the tale,

only with altered names, to their children's children.

Like phantoms painted on the magic slide,

Forth from the darkness of the past we glide,

As living shadows for a moment seen

In airy pageant on the eternal screen,

Traced by a ray from one unchanging flame,

Then seek the dust and stillness whence we came.

Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, whom I well remember, came back from Leyden,

where he had written his Latin graduating thesis, talking of the learned

Gaubius and the late illustrious Boerhaave and other dead Dutchmen, of

whom you know as much, most of you, as you do of Noah's apothecary and

the family physician of Methuselah, whose prescriptions seem to have been

lost to posterity. Dr. Lloyd came back to Boston full of the teachings

of Cheselden and Sharpe, William Hunter, Smellie, and Warner; Dr. James

Jackson loved to tell of Mr. Cline and to talk of Mr. John Hunter; Dr.

Reynolds would give you his recollections of Sir Astley Cooper and Mr.

Abernethy; I have named the famous Frenchmen of my student days; Leyden,

Edinburgh, London, Paris, were each in turn the Mecca of medical

students, just as at the present day Vienna and Berlin are the centres

where our young men crowd for instruction. These also must sooner or

later yield their precedence and pass the torch they hold to other hands.

Where shall it next flame at the head of the long procession? Shall it

find its old place on the shores of the Gulf of Salerno, or shall it

mingle its rays with the northern aurora up among the fiords of

Norway,--or shall it be borne across the Atlantic and reach the banks of

the Charles, where Agassiz and Wyman have taught, where Hagen still

teaches, glowing like his own Lampyris splendidula, with enthusiasm,

where the first of American botanists and the ablest of American surgeons

are still counted in the roll of honor of our great University?

Let me add a few words which shall not be other than cheerful, as I bid

farewell to this edifice which I have known so long. I am grateful to

the roof which has sheltered me, to the floors which have sustained me,

though I have thought it safest always to abstain from anything like

eloquence, lest a burst of too emphatic applause might land my class and

myself in the cellar of the collapsing structure, and bury us in the fate

of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. I have helped to wear these stairs into

hollows,--stairs which I trod when they were smooth and level, fresh from

the plane. There are just thirty-two of them, as there were five and

thirty years ago, but they are steeper and harder to climb, it seems to

me, than they were then. I remember that in the early youth of this

building, the late Dr. John K. Mitchell, father of our famous Dr. Weir

Mitchell, said to me as we came out of the Demonstrator's room, that some

day or other a whole class would go heels over head down this graded

precipice, like the herd told of in Scripture story. This has never

happened as yet; I trust it never will. I have never been proud of the

apartment beneath the seats, in which my preparations for lecture were

made. But I chose it because I could have it to myself, and I resign it,

with a wish that it were more worthy of regret, into the hands of my

successor, with my parting benediction. Within its twilight precincts I

have often prayed for light, like Ajax, for the daylight found scanty

entrance, and the gaslight never illuminated its dark recesses. May it

prove to him who comes after me like the cave of the Sibyl, out of the

gloomy depths of which came the oracles which shone with the rays of

truth and wisdom!

This temple of learning is not surrounded by the mansions of the great

and the wealthy. No stately avenues lead up to its facades and

porticoes. I have sometimes felt, when convoying a distinguished

stranger through its precincts to its door, that he might question

whether star-eyed Science had not missed her way when she found herself

in this not too attractive locality. I cannot regret that we--you, I

should say--are soon to migrate to a more favored region, and carry on

your work as teachers and as learners in ampler halls and under far more

favorable conditions.

I hope that I may have the privilege of meeting you there, possibly may

be allowed to add my words of welcome to those of my former colleagues,

and in that pleasing anticipation I bid good-by to this scene of my long

labors, and, for the present at least, to the friends with whom I have

been associated.

APPENDUM

NOTES TO THE ADDRESS ON CURRENTS AND COUNTER

CURRENTS IN MEDICAL SCIENCE.

Some passages contained in the original manuscript of the Address, and

omitted in the delivery on account of its length, are restored in the

text or incorporated with these Notes.

NOTE A.--

There is good reason to doubt whether the nitrate of silver has any real

efficacy in epilepsy. It has seemed to cure many cases, but epilepsy is

a very uncertain disease, and there is hardly anything which has not been

supposed to cure it. Dr. Copland cites many authorities in its favor,

most especially Lombard's cases. But De la Berge and Monneret (Comp. de

Med. Paris), 1839, analyze these same cases, eleven in number, and can

only draw the inference of a very questionable value in the supposed

remedy. Dr. James Jackson says that relief of epilepsy is not to be

attained by any medicine with which he is acquainted, but by diet.

(Letters to a Young Physician, p. 67.) Guy Patin, Dean of the Faculty of

Paris, Professor at the Royal College, Author of the Antimonial

Martyrology, a wit and a man of sense and learning, who died almost two

hundred years ago, had come to the same conclusion, though the chemists

of his time boasted of their remedies. "Did, you ever see a case of

epilepsy cured by nitrate of silver?" I said to one of the oldest and

most experienced surgeons in this country. "Never," was his instant

reply. Dr. Twitchell's experience was very similar. How, then, did

nitrate of silver come to be given for epilepsy? Because, as Dr. Martin

has so well reminded us, lunatics were considered formerly to be under

the special influence of Luna, the moon (which Esquirol, be it observed,

utterly denies), and lunar caustic, or nitrate of silver, is a salt of

that metal which was called luna from its whiteness, and of course must

be in the closest relations with the moon. It follows beyond all

reasonable question that the moon's metal, silver, and its preparations,

must be the specific remedy for moonblasted maniacs and epileptics!

Yet the practitioner who prescribes the nitrate of silver supposes he is

guided by the solemn experience of the past, instead of by its idle

fancies. He laughs at those old physicians who placed such confidence in

the right hind hoof of an elk as a remedy for the same disease, and

leaves the record of his own belief in a treatment quite as fanciful and

far more objectionable, written in indelible ink upon a living tablet

where he who runs may read it for a whole generation, if nature spares

his walking advertisement so long.

NOTE B.--

The presumption that a man is innocent until he is proved guilty, does

not mean that there are no rogues, but lays the onus probandi on the

party to which it properly belongs. So with this proposition. A noxious

agent should never be employed in sickness unless there is ample evidence

in the particular case to overcome the general presumption against all

such agents, and the evidence is very apt to be defective.

The miserable delusion of Homoeopathy builds itself upon an axiom

directly the opposite of this; namely, that the sick are to be cured by

poisons. Similia similibus curantur means exactly this. It is simply a

theory of universal poisoning, nullified in practice by the infinitesimal

contrivance. The only way to kill it and all similar fancies, and to

throw every quack nostrum into discredit, is to root out completely the

suckers of the old rotten superstition that whatever is odious or noxious

is likely to be good for disease. The current of sound practice with

ourselves is, I believe, setting fast in the direction I have indicated

in the above proposition. To uphold the exhibition of noxious agents in

disease, as the rule, instead of admitting them cautiously and

reluctantly as the exception, is, as I think, an eddy of opinion in the

direction of the barbarism out of which we believe our art is escaping.

It is only through the enlightened sentiment and action of the Medical

Profession that the community can be brought to acknowledge that drugs

should always be regarded as evils.

It is true that some suppose, and our scientific and thoughtful

associate, Dr. Gould, has half countenanced the opinion, that there may

yet be discovered a specific for every disease. Let us not despair of

the future, but let us be moderate in our expectations. When an oil is

discovered that will make a bad watch keep good time; when a recipe is

given which will turn an acephalous foetus into a promising child; when a

man can enter the second time into his mother's womb and give her back

the infirmities which twenty generations have stirred into her blood, and

infused into his own through hers, we may be prepared to enlarge the

National Pharmacopoeia with a list of specifies for everything but old

age,--and possibly for that also.

NOTE C.--

The term specific is used here in its ordinary sense, without raising the

question of the propriety of its application to these or other remedies.

The credit of introducing Cinchona rests between the Jesuits, the

Countess of Chinchon, the Cardinal de Lugo, and Sir Robert Talbor, who

employed it as a secret remedy. (Pereira.) Mercury as an internal

specific remedy was brought into use by that impudent and presumptuous

quack, as he was considered, Paracelsus. (Encyc. Brit. art.

"Paracelsus.") Arsenic was introduced into England as a remedy for

intermittents by Dr. Fowler, in consequence of the success of a patent

medicine, the Tasteless Ague Drops, which were supposed, "probably with

reason," to be a preparation of that mineral. (Rees's Cyc. art.

"Arsenic.") Colchicum came into notice in a similar way, from the

success of the Eau Medicinale of M. Husson, a French military officer.

(Pereira.) Iodine was discovered by a saltpetre manufacturer, but applied

by a physician in place of the old remedy, burnt sponge, which seems to

owe its efficacy to it. (Dunglison, New Remedies.) As for Sulphur, "the

common people have long used it as an ointment" for scabies. (Rees's

Cyc. art. "Scabies.") The modern cantiscorbutic regimen is credited to

Captain Cook. "To his sagacity we are indebted for the first impulse to

those regulations by which scorbutus is so successfully prevented in our

navy." (Lond. Cyc. Prac. Med. art. "Scorbutus.") Iron and various

salts which enter into the normal composition of the human body do not

belong to the materia medica by our definition, but to the materia

alimentaria.

For the first introduction of iron as a remedy, see Pereira, who gives a

very curious old story.

The statement in the text concerning a portion of the materia medica

stands exactly as delivered, and is meant exactly as it stands. No

denunciation of drugs, as sparingly employed by a wise physician, was or

is intended. If, however, as Dr. Gould stated in his "valuable and

practical discourse" to which the Massachusetts Medical Society "listened

with profit as well as interest," "Drugs, in themselves considered, may

always be regarded as evils,"--any one who chooses may question whether

the evils from their abuse are, on the whole, greater or less than the

undoubted benefits obtained from their proper use. The large exception

of opium, wine, specifics, and anaesthetics, made in the text, takes off

enough from the useful side, as I fully believe, to turn the balance; so

that a vessel containing none of these, but loaded with antimony,

strychnine, acetate of lead, aloes, aconite, lobelia, lapis infernalis,

stercus diaboli, tormentilla, and other approved, and, in skilful hands,

really useful remedies, brings, on the whole, more harm than good to the

port it enters.

It is a very narrow and unjust view of the practice of medicine, to

suppose it to consist altogether in the use of powerful drugs, or of

drugs of any kind. Far from it. "The physician may do very much for the

welfare of the sick, more than others can do, although he does not, even

in the major part of cases, undertake to control and overcome the disease

by art. It was with these views that I never reported any patient cured

at our hospital. Those who recovered their health were reported as well;

not implying that they were made so by the active treatment they had

received there. But it was to be understood that all patients received

in that house were to be cured, that is, taken care of." (Letters to a

Young Physician, by James Jackson, M. D., Boston, 1855.)

"Hygienic rules, properly enforced, fresh air, change of air, travel,

attention to diet, good and appropriate food judiciously regulated,

together with the administration of our tonics, porter, ale, wine, iron,

etc., supply the diseased or impoverished system with what Mr. Gull, of

St. Bartholomew's Hospital, aptly calls the 'raw material of the blood;'

and we believe that if any real improvement has taken place in medical

practice, independently of those truly valuable contributions we have

before described, it is in the substitution of tonics, stimulants, and

general management, for drastic cathartics, for bleeding, depressing

agents, including mercury, tartar emetics, etc., so much in vogue during

the early part even of this century." (F. P. Porcher, in Charleston Med.

Journal and Review for January, 1860.) 1860.)

JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.

A MEMOIR, Complete

By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Volume I.

NOTE.

The Memoir here given to the public is based on a biographical sketch

prepared by the writer at the request of the Massachusetts Historical

Society for its Proceedings. The questions involving controversies into

which the Society could not feel called to enter are treated at

considerable length in the following pages. Many details are also given

which would have carried the paper written for the Society beyond the

customary limits of such tributes to the memory of its deceased members.

It is still but an outline which may serve a present need and perhaps be

of some assistance to a future biographer.

I.

1814-1827. To AEt. 13.

BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS.

John Motley, the great-grandfather of the subject of this Memoir, came in

the earlier part of the last century from Belfast in Ireland to Falmouth,

now Portland, in the District, now the State of Maine. He was twice

married, and had ten children, four of the first marriage and six of the

last. Thomas, the youngest son by his first wife, married Emma, a

daughter of John Wait, the first Sheriff of Cumberland County under the

government of the United States. Two of their seven sons, Thomas and

Edward, removed from Portland to Boston in 1802 and established

themselves as partners in commercial business, continuing united and

prosperous for nearly half a century before the firm was dissolved.

The earlier records of New England have preserved the memory of an

incident which deserves mention as showing how the historian's life was

saved by a quickwitted handmaid, more than a hundred years before he was

born. On the 29th of August, 1708, the French and Indians from Canada

made an attack upon the town of Haverhill, in Massachusetts. Thirty or

forty persons were slaughtered, and many others were carried captive into

Canada.

The minister of the town, Rev. Benjamin Rolfe, was killed by a bullet

through the door of his house. Two of his daughters, Mary, aged thirteen,

and Elizabeth, aged nine, were sleeping in a room with the maid-servant,

Hagar. When Hagar heard the whoop of the savages she seized the children,

ran with them into the cellar, and, after concealing them under two large

washtubs, hid herself. The Indians ransacked the cellar, but missed the

prey. Elizabeth, the younger of the two girls, grew up and married the

Rev. Samuel Checkley, first minister of the "New South" Church, Boston.

Her son, Rev. Samuel Checkley, Junior, was minister of the Second Church,

and his successor, Rev. John Lothrop, or Lathrop, as it was more commonly

spelled, married his daughter. Dr. Lothrop was great-grandson of Rev.

John Lothrop, of Scituate, who had been imprisoned in England for

nonconformity. The Checkleys were from Preston Capes, in

Northamptonshire. The name is probably identical with that of the

Chicheles or Chichleys, a well-known Northamptonshire family.

Thomas Motley married Anna, daughter of the Rev. John Lothrop,

granddaughter of the Rev. Samuel Checkley, Junior, the two ministers

mentioned above, both honored in their day and generation. Eight children

were born of this marriage, of whom four are still living.

JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY, the second of these children, was born in

Dorchester, now a part of Boston, Massachusetts, on the 15th of April,

1814. A member of his family gives a most pleasing and interesting

picture, from his own recollections and from what his mother told him, of

the childhood which was to develop into such rich maturity. The boy was

rather delicate in organization, and not much given to outdoor

amusements, except skating and swimming, of which last exercise he was

very fond in his young days, and in which he excelled. He was a great

reader, never idle, but always had a book in his hand,--a volume of

poetry or one of the novels of Scott or Cooper. His fondness for plays

and declamation is illustrated by the story told by a younger brother,

who remembers being wrapped up in a shawl and kept quiet by sweetmeats,

while he figured as the dead Caesar, and his brother, the future

historian, delivered the speech of Antony over his prostrate body. He was

of a most sensitive nature, easily excited, but not tenacious of any

irritated feelings, with a quick sense of honor, and the most entirely

truthful child, his mother used to say, that she had ever seen. Such are

some of the recollections of those who knew him in his earliest years and

in the most intimate relations.

His father's family was at this time living in the house No. 7 Walnut

Street, looking down Chestnut Street over the water to the western hills.

Near by, at the corner of Beacon Street, was the residence of the family

of the first mayor of Boston, and at a little distance from the opposite

corner was the house of one of the fathers of New England manufacturing

enterprise, a man of superior intellect, who built up a great name and

fortune in our city. The children from these three homes naturally became

playmates. Mr. Motley's house was a very hospitable one, and Lothrop and

two of his young companions were allowed to carry out their schemes of

amusement in the garden and the garret. If one with a prescient glance

could have looked into that garret on some Saturday afternoon while our

century was not far advanced in its second score of years, he might have

found three boys in cloaks and doublets and plumed hats, heroes and

bandits, enacting more or less impromptu melodramas. In one of the boys

he would have seen the embryo dramatist of a nation's life history, John

Lothrop Motley; in the second, a famous talker and wit who has spilled

more good things on the wasteful air in conversation than would carry a

"diner-out" through half a dozen London seasons, and waked up somewhat

after the usual flowering-time of authorship to find himself a very

agreeable and cordially welcomed writer,--Thomas Gold Appleton. In the

third he would have recognized a champion of liberty known wherever that

word is spoken, an orator whom to hear is to revive all the traditions of

the grace, the address, the commanding sway of the silver-tongued

eloquence of the most renowned speakers,--Wendell Phillips.

Both of young Motley's playmates have furnished me with recollections of

him and of those around him at this period of his life, and I cannot do

better than borrow freely from their communications. His father was a man

of decided character, social, vivacious, witty, a lover of books, and

himself not unknown as a writer, being the author of one or more of the

well remembered "Jack Downing" letters. He was fond of having the boys

read to him from such authors as Channing and Irving, and criticised

their way of reading with discriminating judgment and taste. Mrs. Motley

was a woman who could not be looked upon without admiration. I remember

well the sweet dignity of her aspect, her "regal beauty," as Mr. Phillips

truly styles it, and the charm of her serene and noble presence, which

made her the type of a perfect motherhood. Her character corresponded to

the promise of her gracious aspect. She was one of the fondest of

mothers, but not thoughtlessly indulgent to the boy from whom she hoped

and expected more than she thought it wise to let him know. The story

used to be current that in their younger days this father and mother were

the handsomest pair the town of Boston could show. This son of theirs was

"rather tall," says Mr. Phillips, "lithe, very graceful in movement and

gesture, and there was something marked and admirable in the set of his

head on his shoulders,"--a peculiar elegance which was most noticeable in

those later days when I knew him. Lady Byron long afterwards spoke of him

as more like her husband in appearance than any other person she had met;

but Mr. Phillips, who remembers the first bloom of his boyhood and youth,

thinks he was handsomer than any portrait of Byron represents the poet.

"He could not have been eleven years old," says the same correspondent,

"when he began writing a novel. It opened, I remember, not with one

solitary horseman, but with two, riding up to an inn in the valley of the

Housatonic. Neither of us had ever seen the Housatonic, but it sounded

grand and romantic. Two chapters were finished."

There is not much remembered of the single summer he passed at Mr.

Green's school at Jamaica Plain. From that school he went to Round Hill,

Northampton, then under the care of Mr. Cogswell and Mr. Bancroft. The

historian of the United States could hardly have dreamed that the

handsome boy of ten years was to take his place at the side of his

teacher in the first rank of writers in his own department. Motley came

to Round Hill, as one of his schoolmates tells me, with a great

reputation, especially as a declaimer. He had a remarkable facility for

acquiring languages, excelled as a reader and as a writer, and was the

object of general admiration for his many gifts. There is some reason to

think that the flattery he received was for a time a hindrance to his

progress and the development of his character. He obtained praise too

easily, and learned to trust too much to his genius. He had everything to

spoil him,--beauty, precocious intelligence, and a personal charm which

might have made him a universal favorite. Yet he does not seem to have

been generally popular at this period of his life. He was wilful,

impetuous, sometimes supercilious, always fastidious. He would study as

he liked, and not by rule. His school and college mates believed in his

great possibilities through all his forming period, but it may be doubted

if those who counted most confidently on his future could have supposed

that he would develop the heroic power of concentration, the

long-breathed tenacity of purpose, which in after years gave effect to

his brilliant mental endowments. "I did wonder," says Mr. Wendell

Phillips, "at the diligence and painstaking, the drudgery shown in his

historical works. In early life he had no industry, not needing it. All

he cared for in a book he caught quickly,--the spirit of it, and all his

mind needed or would use. This quickness of apprehension was marvellous."

I do not find from the recollections of his schoolmates at Northampton

that he was reproached for any grave offences, though he may have

wandered beyond the prescribed boundaries now and then, and studied

according to his inclinations rather than by rule. While at that school

he made one acquisition much less common then than now,--a knowledge of

the German language and some degree of acquaintance with its literature,

under the guidance of one of the few thorough German scholars this

country then possessed, Mr. George Bancroft.

II.

1827-1831. AEt. 13-17.

COLLEGE LIFE.

Such then was the boy who at the immature, we might almost say the

tender, age of thirteen entered Harvard College. Though two years after

me in college standing, I remember the boyish reputation which he brought

with him, especially that of a wonderful linguist, and the impression

which his striking personal beauty produced upon us as he took his seat

in the college chapel. But it was not until long after this period that I

became intimately acquainted with him, and I must again have recourse to

the classmates and friends who have favored me with their reminiscences

of this period of his life. Mr. Phillips says:

"During our first year in college, though the youngest in the class,

he stood third, I think, or second in college rank, and ours was an

especially able class. Yet to maintain this rank he neither cared

nor needed to make any effort. Too young to feel any

responsibilities, and not yet awake to any ambition, he became so

negligent that he was 'rusticated' [that is, sent away from college

for a time]. He came back sobered, and worked rather more, but with

no effort for college rank thenceforward."

I must finish the portrait of the collegian with all its lights and

shadows by the help of the same friends from whom I have borrowed the

preceding outlines.

He did not care to make acquaintances, was haughty in manner and cynical

in mood, at least as he appeared to those in whom he felt no special

interest. It is no wonder, therefore, that he was not a popular favorite,

although recognized as having very brilliant qualities. During all this

period his mind was doubtless fermenting with projects which kept him in

a fevered and irritable condition. "He had a small writing-table," Mr.

Phillips says, "with a shallow drawer; I have often seen it half full of

sketches, unfinished poems, soliloquies, a scene or two of a play, prose

portraits of some pet character, etc. These he would read to me, though

he never volunteered to do so, and every now and then he burnt the whole

and began to fill the drawer again."

My friend, Mr. John Osborne Sargent, who was a year before him in

college, says, in a very interesting letter with which he has favored me:

"My first acquaintance with him [Motley] was at Cambridge, when he

came from Mr. Cogswell's school at Round Hill. He then had a good

deal of the shyness that was just pronounced enough to make him

interesting, and which did not entirely wear off till he left

college. . . I soon became acquainted with him, and we used to take

long walks together, sometimes taxing each other's memory for poems

or passages from poems that had struck our fancy. Shelley was then

a great favorite of his, and I remember that Praed's verses then

appearing in the 'New Monthly' he thought very clever and brilliant,

and was fond of repeating them. You have forgotten, or perhaps

never knew, that Motley's first appearance in print was in the

'Collegian.' He brought me one day, in a very modest mood, a

translation from Goethe, which I was most happy to oblige him by

inserting. It was very prettily done, and will now be a curiosity.

. . . How it happened that Motley wrote only one piece I do not

remember. I had the pleasure about that time of initiating him as a

member of the Knights of the Square Table,--always my favorite

college club, for the reason, perhaps, that I was a sometime Grand

Master. He was always a genial and jovial companion at our supper-

parties at Fresh Pond and Gallagher's."

We who live in the days of photographs know how many faces belong to

every individual. We know too under what different aspects the same

character appears to those who study it from different points of view and

with different prepossessions. I do not hesitate, therefore, to place

side by side the impressions of two of his classmates as to one of his

personal traits as they observed him at this period of his youth.

"He was a manly boy, with no love for or leaning to girls' company;

no care for dress; not a trace of personal vanity. . . . He was,

or at least seemed, wholly unconscious of his rare beauty and of the

fascination of his manner; not a trace of pretence, the simplest and

most natural creature in the world."

Look on that picture and on this:--

"He seemed to have a passion for dress. But as in everything else,

so in this, his fancy was a fitful one. At one time he would excite

our admiration by the splendor of his outfit, and perhaps the next

week he would seem to take equal pleasure in his slovenly or

careless appearance."

It is not very difficult to reconcile these two portraitures. I recollect

it was said by a witty lady of a handsome clergyman well remembered among

us, that he had dressy eyes. Motley so well became everything he wore,

that if he had sprung from his bed and slipped his clothes on at an alarm

of fire, his costume would have looked like a prince's undress. His

natural presentment, like that of Count D'Orsay, was of the kind which

suggests the intentional effects of an elaborate toilet, no matter how

little thought or care may have been given to make it effective. I think

the "passion for dress" was really only a seeming, and that he often

excited admiration when he had not taken half the pains to adorn himself

that many a youth less favored by nature has wasted upon his unblest

exterior only to be laughed at.

I gather some other interesting facts from a letter which I have received

from his early playmate and school and college classmate, Mr. T. G.

Appleton.

"In his Sophomore year he kept abreast of the prescribed studies,

but his heart was out of bounds, as it often had been at Round Hill

when chasing squirrels or rabbits through forbidden forests.

Already his historical interest was shaping his life. A tutor

coming-by chance, let us hope--to his room remonstrated with him

upon the heaps of novels upon his table.

"'Yes,' said Motley, 'I am reading historically, and have come to the

novels of the nineteenth century. Taken in the lump, they are very hard

reading.'"

All Old Cambridge people know the Brattle House, with its gambrel roof,

its tall trees, its perennial spring, its legendary fame of good fare and

hospitable board in the days of the kindly old bon vivant, Major Brattle.

In this house the two young students, Appleton and Motley, lived during a

part of their college course.

"Motley's room was on the ground floor, the room to the left of the

entrance. He led a very pleasant life there, tempering his college

duties with the literature he loved, and receiving his friends

amidst elegant surroundings, which added to the charm of his

society. Occasionally we amused ourselves by writing for the

magazines and papers of the day. Mr. Willis had just started a slim

monthly, written chiefly by himself, but with the true magazine

flavor. We wrote for that, and sometimes verses in the corner of a

paper called 'The Anti-Masonic Mirror,' and in which corner was a

woodcut of Apollo, and inviting to destruction ambitious youths by

the legend underneath,--

'Much yet remains unsung.'

These pieces were usually dictated to each other, the poet recumbent

upon the bed and a classmate ready to carry off the manuscript for

the paper of the following day. 'Blackwood's' was then in its

glory, its pages redolent of 'mountain dew' in every sense; the

humor of the Shepherd, the elegantly brutal onslaughts upon Whigs

and Cockney poets by Christopher North, intoxicated us youths.

"It was young writing, and made for the young. The opinions were

charmingly wrong, and its enthusiasm was half Glenlivet. But this

delighted the boys. There were no reprints then, and to pass the

paper-cutter up the fresh inviting pages was like swinging over the

heather arm in arm with Christopher himself. It is a little

singular that though we had a college magazine of our own, Motley

rarely if ever wrote for it. I remember a translation from Goethe,

'The Ghost-Seer,' which he may have written for it, and a poem upon

the White Mountains. Motley spoke at one of the college exhibitions

an essay on Goethe so excellent that Mr. Joseph Cogswell sent it to

Madam Goethe, who, after reading it, said, 'I wish to see the first

book that young man will write.'"

Although Motley did not aim at or attain a high college rank, the rules

of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, which confine the number of members to the

first sixteen of each class, were stretched so as to include him,--a

tribute to his recognized ability, and an evidence that a distinguished

future was anticipated for him.

III.

1832-1833. AEt. 18-19.

STUDY AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE.

Of the two years divided between the Universities of Berlin and Gottingen

I have little to record. That he studied hard I cannot doubt; that he

found himself in pleasant social relations with some of his

fellow-students seems probable from the portraits he has drawn in his

first story, "Morton's Hope," and is rendered certain so far as one of

his companions is concerned. Among the records of the past to which he

referred during his last visit to this country was a letter which he took

from a collection of papers and handed me to read one day when I was

visiting him. The letter was written in a very lively and exceedingly

familiar vein. It implied such intimacy, and called up in such a lively

way the gay times Motley and himself had had together in their youthful

days, that I was puzzled to guess who could have addressed him from

Germany in that easy and off-hand fashion. I knew most of his old friends

who would be likely to call him by his baptismal name in its most

colloquial form, and exhausted my stock of guesses unsuccessfully before

looking at the signature. I confess that I was surprised, after laughing

at the hearty and almost boyish tone of the letter, to read at the bottom

of the page the signature of Bismarck. I will not say that I suspect

Motley of having drawn the portrait of his friend in one of the

characters of "Morton's Hope," but it is not hard to point out traits in

one of them which we can believe may have belonged to the great

Chancellor at an earlier period of life than that at which the world

contemplates his overshadowing proportions.

Hoping to learn something of Motley during the two years while we had

lost sight of him, I addressed a letter to His Highness Prince Bismarck,

to which I received the following reply:--

FOREIGN OFFICE, BERLIN, March 11, 1878.

SIR,--I am directed by Prince Bismarck to acknowledge the receipt of

your letter of the 1st of January, relating to the biography of the

late Mr. Motley. His Highness deeply regrets that the state of his

health and pressure of business do not allow him to contribute

personally, and as largely as he would be delighted to do, to your

depicting of a friend whose memory will be ever dear to him. Since

I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Mr. Motley at

Varzin, I have been intrusted with communicating to you a few

details I have gathered from the mouth of the Prince. I enclose

them as they are jotted down, without any attempt of digestion.

I have the honor to be

Your obedient servant,

LOTHAIR BUCHER.

"Prince Bismarck said:--

"'I met Motley at Gottingen in 1832, I am not sure if at the

beginning of Easter Term or Michaelmas Term. He kept company with

German students, though more addicted to study than we members of

the fighting clubs (corps). Although not having mastered yet the

German language, he exercised a marked attraction by a conversation

sparkling with wit, humor, and originality. In autumn of 1833,

having both of us migrated from Gottingen to Berlin for the

prosecution of our studies, we became fellow-lodgers in the house

No. 161 Friedrich Strasse. There we lived in the closest intimacy,

sharing meals and outdoor exercise. Motley by that time had arrived

at talking German fluently; he occupied himself not only in

translating Goethe's poem "Faust," but tried his hand even in

composing German verses. Enthusiastic admirer of Shakespeare,

Byron, Goethe, he used to spice his conversation abundantly with

quotations from these his favorite authors. A pertinacious arguer,

so much so that sometimes he watched my awakening in order to

continue a discussion on some topic of science, poetry, or practical

life, cut short by the chime of the small hours, he never lost his

mild and amiable temper. Our faithful companion was Count Alexander

Keyserling, a native of Courland, who has since achieved distinction

as a botanist.

"'Motley having entered the diplomatic service of his country, we

had frequently the opportunity of renewing our friendly intercourse;

at Frankfort he used to stay with me, the welcome guest of my wife;

we also met at Vienna, and, later, here. The last time I saw him

was in 1872 at Varzin, at the celebration of my "silver wedding,"

namely, the twenty-fifth anniversary.

"'The most striking feature of his handsome and delicate appearance

was uncommonly large and beautiful eyes. He never entered a

drawing-room without exciting the curiosity and sympathy of the

ladies.'"

It is but a glimpse of their young life which the great statesman gives

us, but a bright and pleasing one. Here were three students, one of whom

was to range in the flowery fields of the loveliest of the sciences,

another to make the dead past live over again in his burning pages, and a

third to extend an empire as the botanist spread out a plant and the

historian laid open a manuscript.

IV.

1834-1839. 2ET. 20-25.

RETURN TO AMERICA.--STUDY OF LAW.--MARRIAGE.--HIS FIRST NOVEL, "MORTON'S

HOPE."

Of the years passed in the study of law after his return from Germany I

have very little recollection, and nothing of importance to record. He

never became seriously engaged in the practice of the profession he had

chosen. I had known him pleasantly rather than intimately, and our

different callings tended to separate us. I met him, however, not very

rarely, at one house where we were both received with the greatest

cordiality, and where the attractions brought together many both young

and old to enjoy the society of its charming and brilliant inmates. This

was at No. 14 Temple Place, where Mr. Park Benjamin was then living with

his two sisters, both in the bloom of young womanhood. Here Motley found

the wife to whom his life owed so much of its success and its happiness.

Those who remember Mary Benjamin find it hard to speak of her in the

common terms of praise which they award to the good and the lovely. She

was not only handsome and amiable and agreeable, but there was a cordial

frankness, an openhearted sincerity about her which made her seem like a

sister to those who could help becoming her lovers. She stands quite

apart in the memory of the friends who knew her best, even from the

circle of young persons whose recollections they most cherish. Yet hardly

could one of them have foreseen all that she was to be to him whose life

she was to share. They were married on the 2d of March, 1837. His

intimate friend, Mr. Joseph Lewis Stackpole, was married at about the

same time to her sister, thus joining still more closely in friendship

the two young men who were already like brothers in their mutual

affection.

Two years after his marriage, in 1839, appeared his first work, a novel

in two volumes, called "Morton's Hope." He had little reason to be

gratified with its reception. The general verdict was not favorable to

it, and the leading critical journal of America, not usually harsh or

cynical in its treatment of native authorship, did not even give it a

place among its "Critical Notices," but dropped a small-print

extinguisher upon it in one of the pages of its "List of New

Publications." Nothing could be more utterly disheartening than the

unqualified condemnation passed upon the story. At the same time the

critic says that "no one can read 'Morton's Hope' without perceiving it

to have been written by a person of uncommon resources of mind and

scholarship."

It must be confessed that, as a story, "Morton's Hope" cannot endure a

searching or even a moderately careful criticism. It is wanting in

cohesion, in character, even in a proper regard to circumstances of time

and place; it is a map of dissected incidents which has been flung out of

its box and has arranged itself without the least regard to chronology or

geography. It is not difficult to trace in it many of the influences

which had helped in forming or deforming the mind of the young man of

twenty-five, not yet come into possession of his full inheritance of the

slowly ripening qualities which were yet to assert their robust

independence. How could he help admiring Byron and falling into more or

less unconscious imitation of his moods if not of his special

affectations? Passion showing itself off against a dark foil of cynicism;

sentiment, ashamed of its own self-betrayal, and sneering at itself from

time to time for fear of the laugh of the world at its sincerity,--how

many young men were spoiled and how many more injured by becoming bad

copies of a bad ideal! The blood of Don Juan ran in the veins of Vivian

Grey and of Pelham. But if we read the fantastic dreams of Disraeli, the

intellectual dandyisms of Bulwer, remembering the after careers of which

these were the preludes, we can understand how there might well be

something in those earlier efforts which would betray itself in the way

of thought and in the style of the young men who read them during the

plastic period of their minds and characters. Allow for all these

influences, allow for whatever impressions his German residence and his

familiarity with German literature had produced; accept the fact that the

story is to the last degree disjointed, improbable, impossible; lay it

aside as a complete failure in what it attempted to be, and read it, as

"Vivian Grey" is now read, in the light of the career which it heralded.

"Morton's Hope" is not to be read as a novel: it is to be studied as an

autobiography, a prophecy, a record of aspirations, disguised under a

series of incidents which are flung together with no more regard to the

unities than a pack of shuffled playing-cards. I can do nothing better

than let him picture himself, for it is impossible not to recognize the

portrait. It is of little consequence whether every trait is an exact

copy from his own features, but it is so obvious that many of the lines

are direct transcripts from nature that we may believe the same thing of

many others. Let us compare his fictitious hero's story with what we have

read of his own life.

In early boyhood Morton amused himself and astonished those about him by

enacting plays for a puppet theatre. This was at six years old, and at

twelve we find him acting in a play with other boys, just as Motley's

playmates have already described him. The hero may now speak for himself,

but we shall all perceive that we are listening to the writer's own

story.

"I was always a huge reader; my mind was essentially craving and

insatiable. Its appetite was enormous, and it devoured too greedily

for health. I rejected all guidance in my studies. I already

fancied myself a misanthrope. I had taken a step very common for

boys of my age, and strove with all my might to be a cynic."

He goes on to describe, under the perfectly transparent mask of his hero,

the course of his studies. "To poetry, like most infants, I devoted most

of my time." From modern poetry he went back to the earlier sources,

first with the idea of systematic reading and at last through Chaucer and

Gower and early ballads, until he lost himself "in a dismal swamp of

barbarous romances and lying Latin chronicles. I got hold of the

Bibliotheca Monastica, containing a copious account of Anglo-Norman

authors, with notices of their works, and set seriously to reading every

one of them." One profit of his antiquarianism, however, was, as he says,

his attention to foreign languages,--French, Spanish, German, especially

in their earliest and rudest forms of literature. From these he ascended

to the ancient poets, and from Latin to Greek. He would have taken up the

study of the Oriental languages, but for the advice of a relative, who

begged him seriously to turn his attention to history. The paragraph

which follows must speak for itself as a true record under a feigned

heading.

"The groundwork of my early character was plasticity and fickleness.

I was mortified by this exposure of my ignorance, and disgusted with

my former course of reading. I now set myself violently to the

study of history. With my turn of mind, and with the preposterous

habits which I had been daily acquiring, I could not fail to make as

gross mistakes in the pursuit of this as of other branches of

knowledge. I imagined, on setting out, a system of strict and

impartial investigation of the sources of history. I was inspired

with the absurd ambition, not uncommon to youthful students, of

knowing as much as their masters. I imagined it necessary for me,

stripling as I was, to study the authorities; and, imbued with the

strict necessity of judging for myself, I turned from the limpid

pages of the modern historians to the notes and authorities at the

bottom of the page. These, of course, sent me back to my monastic

acquaintances, and I again found myself in such congenial company to

a youthful and ardent mind as Florence of Worcester and Simeon of

Durham, the Venerable Bede and Matthew Paris; and so on to Gregory

and Fredegarius, down to the more modern and elegant pages of

Froissart, Hollinshed, Hooker, and Stowe. Infant as I was, I

presumed to grapple with masses of learning almost beyond the

strength of the giants of history. A spendthrift of my time and

labor, I went out of my way to collect materials, and to build for

myself, when I should have known that older and abler architects had

already appropriated all that was worth preserving; that the edifice

was built, the quarry exhausted, and that I was, consequently, only

delving amidst rubbish.

"This course of study was not absolutely without its advantages.

The mind gained a certain proportion of vigor even by this exercise

of its faculties, just as my bodily health would have been improved

by transporting the refuse ore of a mine from one pit to another,

instead of coining the ingots which lay heaped before my eyes.

Still, however, my time was squandered. There was a constant want

of fitness and concentration of my energies. My dreams of education

were boundless, brilliant, indefinite; but alas! they were only

dreams. There was nothing accurate and defined in my future course

of life. I was ambitious and conceited, but my aspirations were

vague and shapeless. I had crowded together the most gorgeous and

even some of the most useful and durable materials for my woof, but

I had no pattern, and consequently never began to weave.

"I had not made the discovery that an individual cannot learn, nor

be, everything; that the world is a factory in which each individual

must perform his portion of work:--happy enough if he can choose it

according to his taste and talent, but must renounce the desire of

observing or superintending the whole operation. . . .

"From studying and investigating the sources of history with my own

eyes, I went a step further; I refused the guidance of modern

writers; and proceeding from one point of presumption to another, I

came to the magnanimous conviction that I could not know history as

I ought to know it unless I wrote it for myself. . . .

"It would be tedious and useless to enlarge upon my various attempts

and various failures. I forbear to comment upon mistakes which I

was in time wise enough to retrieve. Pushing out as I did, without

compass and without experience, on the boundless ocean of learning,

what could I expect but an utter and a hopeless shipwreck?

"Thus I went on, becoming more learned, and therefore more ignorant,

more confused in my brain, and more awkward in my habits, from day

to day. I was ever at my studies, and could hardly be prevailed

upon to allot a moment to exercise or recreation. I breakfasted

with a pen behind my ear, and dined in company with a folio bigger

than the table. I became solitary and morose, the necessary

consequence of reckless study; talked impatiently of the value of my

time, and the immensity of my labors; spoke contemptuously of the

learning and acquirements of the whole world, and threw out

mysterious hints of the magnitude and importance of my own project.

"In the midst of all this study and this infant authorship the

perusal of such masses of poetry could not fail to produce their

effect. Of a youth whose mind, like mine at that period, possessed

some general capability, without perhaps a single prominent and

marked talent, a proneness to imitation is sure to be the besetting

sin. I consequently, for a large portion of my earlier life, never

read a work which struck my fancy, without planning a better one

upon its model; for my ambition, like my vanity, knew no bounds.

It was a matter of course that I should be attacked by the poetic

mania. I took the infection at the usual time, went through its

various stages, and recovered as soon as could be expected. I

discovered soon enough that emulation is not capability, and he is

fortunate to whom is soonest revealed the relative extent of his

ambition and his powers.

"My ambition was boundless; my dreams of glory were not confined to

authorship and literature alone; but every sphere in which the

intellect of man exerts itself revolved in a blaze of light before

me. And there I sat in my solitude and dreamed such wondrous

dreams! Events were thickening around me which were soon to change

the world, but they were unmarked by me. The country was changing

to a mighty theatre, on whose stage those who were as great as I

fancied myself to be were to enact a stupendous drama in which I had

no part. I saw it not; I knew it not; and yet how infinitely

beautiful were the imaginations of my solitude! Fancy shook her

kaleidoscope each moment as chance directed, and lo! what new,

fantastic, brilliant, but what unmeaning visions. My ambitious

anticipations were as boundless as they were various and

conflicting. There was not a path which leads to glory in which I

was not destined to gather laurels. As a warrior I would conquer

and overrun the world. As a statesman I would reorganize and govern

it. As a historian I would consign it all to immortality; and in my

leisure moments I would be a great poet and a man of the world.

"In short, I was already enrolled in that large category of what are

called young men of genius,--men who are the pride of their sisters

and the glory of their grandmothers,--men of whom unheard-of things

are expected, till after long preparation comes a portentous

failure, and then they are forgotten; subsiding into indifferent

apprentices and attorneys' clerks.

"Alas for the golden imaginations of our youth! They are bright and

beautiful, but they fade. They glitter brightly enough to deceive

the wisest and most cautious, and we garner them up in the most

secret caskets of our hearts; but are they not like the coins which

the Dervise gave the merchant in the story? When we look for them

the next morning, do we not find them withered leaves?"

The ideal picture just drawn is only a fuller portraiture of the youth

whose outlines have been already sketched by the companions of his

earlier years. If his hero says, "I breakfasted with a pen behind my ear

and dined in company with a folio bigger than the table," one of his

family says of the boy Motley that "if there were five minutes before

dinner, when he came into the parlor he always took up some book near at

hand and began to read until dinner was announced." The same unbounded

thirst for knowledge, the same history of various attempts and various

failures, the same ambition, not yet fixed in its aim, but showing itself

in restless effort, belong to the hero of the story and its narrator.

Let no man despise the first efforts of immature genius. Nothing can be

more crude as a novel, nothing more disappointing, than "Morton's Hope."

But in no other of Motley's writings do we get such an inside view of his

character with its varied impulses, its capricious appetites, its

unregulated forces, its impatient grasp for all kinds of knowledge. With

all his university experiences at home and abroad, it might be said with

a large measure of truth that he was a self-educated man, as he had been

a self-taught boy. His instincts were too powerful to let him work

quietly in the common round of school and college training. Looking at

him as his companions describe him, as he delineates himself 'mutato

nomine,' the chances of success would have seemed to all but truly

prophetic eyes very doubtful, if not decidedly against him. Too many

brilliant young novel-readers and lovers of poetry, excused by their

admirers for their shortcomings on the strength of their supposed

birthright of "genius," have ended where they began; flattered into the

vain belief that they were men at eighteen or twenty, and finding out at

fifty that they were and always had been nothing more than boys. It was

but a tangled skein of life that Motley's book showed us at twenty-five,

and older men might well have doubted whether it would ever be wound off

in any continuous thread. To repeat his own words, he had crowded

together the materials for his work, but he had no pattern, and

consequently never began to weave.

The more this first work of Motley's is examined, the more are its faults

as a story and its interest as a self-revelation made manifest to the

reader. The future historian, who spared no pains to be accurate, falls

into the most extraordinary anachronisms in almost every chapter. Brutus

in a bob-wig, Othello in a swallow-tail coat, could hardly be more

incongruously equipped than some of his characters in the manner of

thought, the phrases, the way of bearing themselves which belong to them

in the tale, but never could have belonged to characters of our

Revolutionary period. He goes so far in his carelessness as to mix up

dates in such a way as almost to convince us that he never looked over

his own manuscript or proofs. His hero is in Prague in June, 1777,

reading a letter received from America in less than a fortnight from the

date of its being written; in August of the same year he is in the

American camp, where he is found in the company of a certain Colonel

Waldron, an officer of some standing in the Revolutionary Army, with whom

he is said to have been constantly associated for some three months,

having arrived in America, as he says, on the 15th of May, that is to

say, six weeks or more before he sailed, according to his previous

account. Bohemia seems to have bewitched his chronology as it did

Shakespeare's geography. To have made his story a consistent series of

contradictions, Morton should have sailed from that Bohemian seashore

which may be found in "A Winter's Tale," but not in the map of Europe.

And yet in the midst of all these marks of haste and negligence, here and

there the philosophical student of history betrays himself, the ideal of

noble achievement glows in an eloquent paragraph, or is embodied in a

loving portrait like that of the professor and historian Harlem. The

novel, taken in connection with the subsequent developments of the

writer's mind, is a study of singular interest. It is a chaos before the

creative epoch; the light has not been divided from the darkness; the

firmament has not yet divided the waters from the waters. The forces at

work in a human intelligence to bring harmony out of its discordant

movements are as mysterious, as miraculous, we might truly say, as those

which give shape and order to the confused materials out of which

habitable worlds are evolved. It is too late now to be sensitive over

this unsuccessful attempt as a story and unconscious success as a

self-portraiture. The first sketches of Paul Veronese, the first patterns

of the Gobelin tapestry, are not to be criticised for the sake of

pointing out their inevitable and too manifest imperfections. They are to

be carefully studied as the earliest efforts of the hand which painted

the Marriage at Cana, of the art which taught the rude fabrics made to be

trodden under foot to rival the glowing canvas of the great painters.

None of Motley's subsequent writings give such an insight into his

character and mental history. It took many years to train the as yet

undisciplined powers into orderly obedience, and to bring the unarranged

materials into the organic connection which was needed in the

construction of a work that should endure. There was a long interval

between his early manhood and the middle term of life, during which the

slow process of evolution was going on. There are plants which open their

flowers with the first rays of the sun; there are others that wait until

evening to spread their petals. It was already the high noon of life with

him before his genius had truly shown itself; if he had not lived beyond

this period, he would have left nothing to give him a lasting name.

V.

1841-1842. AEt. 27-28.

FIRST DIPLOMATIC APPOINTMENT, SECRETARY OF LEGATION TO THE RUSSIAN

MISSION.--BRIEF RESIDENCE AT ST. PETERSBURG.--LETTER TO HIS MOTHER.

--RETURN.

In the autumn of 1841, Mr. Motley received the appointment of Secretary

of Legation to the Russian Mission, Mr. Todd being then the Minister.

Arriving at St. Petersburg just at the beginning of winter, he found the

climate acting very unfavorably upon his spirits if not upon his health,

and was unwilling that his wife and his two young children should be

exposed to its rigors. The expense of living, also, was out of proportion

to his income, and his letters show that he had hardly established

himself in St. Petersburg before he had made up his mind to leave a place

where he found he had nothing to do and little to enjoy. He was homesick,

too, as a young husband and father with an affectionate nature like his

ought to have been under these circumstances. He did not regret having

made the experiment, for he knew that he should not have been satisfied

with himself if he had not made it. It was his first trial of a career in

which he contemplated embarking, and in which afterwards he had an

eventful experience. In his private letters to his family, many of which

I have had the privilege of looking over, he mentions in detail all the

reasons which influenced him in forming his own opinion about the

expediency of a continued residence at St. Petersburg, and leaves the

decision to her in whose judgment he always had the greatest confidence.

No unpleasant circumstance attended his resignation of his secretaryship,

and though it must have been a disappointment to find that the place did

not suit him, as he and his family were then situated, it was only at the

worst an experiment fairly tried and not proving satisfactory. He left

St. Petersburg after a few months' residence, and returned to America. On

reaching New York he was met by the sad tidings of the death of his

first-born child, a boy of great promise, who had called out all the

affections of his ardent nature. It was long before he recovered from the

shock of this great affliction. The boy had shown a very quick and bright

intelligence, and his father often betrayed a pride in his gifts and

graces which he never for a moment made apparent in regard to his own.

Among the letters which he wrote from St. Petersburg are two miniature

ones directed to this little boy. His affectionate disposition shows

itself very sweetly in these touching mementos of a love of which his

first great sorrow was so soon to be born. Not less charming are his

letters to his mother, showing the tenderness with which he always

regarded her, and full of all the details which he thought would

entertain one to whom all that related to her children was always

interesting. Of the letters to his wife it is needless to say more than

that they always show the depth of the love he bore her and the absolute

trust he placed in her, consulting her at all times as his nearest and

wisest friend and adviser,--one in all respects fitted "To warn, to

comfort, and command."

I extract a passage from one of his letters to his mother, as much for

the sake of lending a character of reality to his brief residence at St.

Petersburg as for that of the pleasant picture it gives us of an interior

in that Northern capital.

"We entered through a small vestibule, with the usual arrangement of

treble doors, padded with leather to exclude the cold and guarded by

two 'proud young porters' in severe cocked hats and formidable

batons, into a broad hall,--threw off our furred boots and cloaks,

ascended a carpeted marble staircase, in every angle of which stood

a statuesque footman in gaudy coat and unblemished unmentionables,

and reached a broad landing upon the top thronged as usual with

servants. Thence we passed through an antechamber into a long,

high, brilliantly lighted, saffron-papered room, in which a dozen

card-tables were arranged, and thence into the receiving room. This

was a large room, with a splendidly inlaid and polished floor, the

walls covered with crimson satin, the cornices heavily incrusted

with gold, and the ceiling beautifully painted in arabesque. The

massive fauteuils and sofas, as also the drapery, were of crimson

satin with a profusion of gilding. The ubiquitous portrait of the

Emperor was the only picture, and was the same you see everywhere.

This crimson room had two doors upon the side facing the three

windows: The innermost opened into a large supper-room, in which a

table was spread covered with the usual refreshments of European

parties,--tea, ices, lemonade, and et ceteras,--and the other opened

into a ball-room which is a sort of miniature of the 'salle blanche'

of the Winter Palace, being white and gold, and very brilliantly

lighted with 'ormolu' chandeliers filled with myriads of candles.

This room (at least forty feet long by perhaps twenty-five) opened

into a carpeted conservatory of about the same size, filled with

orange-trees and japonica plants covered with fruit and flowers,

arranged very gracefully into arbors, with luxurious seats under the

pendent boughs, and with here and there a pretty marble statue

gleaming through the green and glossy leaves. One might almost have

imagined one's self in the 'land of the cypress and myrtle' instead

of our actual whereabout upon the polar banks of the Neva.

Wandering through these mimic groves, or reposing from the fatigues

of the dance, was many a fair and graceful form, while the

brilliantly lighted ballroom, filled with hundreds of exquisitely

dressed women (for the Russian ladies, if not very pretty, are

graceful, and make admirable toilettes), formed a dazzling contrast

with the tempered light of the 'Winter Garden.' The conservatory

opened into a library, and from the library you reach the

antechamber, thus completing the 'giro' of one of the prettiest

houses in St. Petersburg. I waltzed one waltz and quadrilled one

quadrille, but it was hard work; and as the sole occupation of these

parties is dancing and card-playing--conversation apparently not

being customary--they are to me not very attractive."

He could not be happy alone, and there were good reasons against his

being joined by his wife and children.

"With my reserved habits," he says, "it would take a great deal

longer to become intimate here than to thaw the Baltic. I have only

to 'knock that it shall be opened to me,' but that is just what I

hate to do. . . . 'Man delights not me, no, nor woman neither.'"

Disappointed in his expectations, but happy in the thought of meeting his

wife and children, he came back to his household to find it clad in

mourning for the loss of its first-born.

VI.

1844. AEt. 30.

LETTER TO PARK BENJAMIN.--POLITICAL VIEWS AND FEELINGS.

A letter to Mr. Park Benjamin, dated December 17, 1844, which has been

kindly lent me by Mrs. Mary Lanman Douw of Poughkeepsie, gives a very

complete and spirited account of himself at this period. He begins with a

quiet, but tender reference to the death of his younger brother, Preble,

one of the most beautiful youths seen or remembered among us, "a great

favorite," as he says, "in the family and in deed with every one who knew

him." He mentions the fact that his friends and near connections, the

Stackpoles, are in Washington, which place he considers as exceptionally

odious at the time when he is writing. The election of Mr. Polk as the

opponent of Henry Clay gives him a discouraged feeling about our

institutions. The question, he thinks, is now settled that a statesman

can never again be called to administer the government of the country. He

is almost if not quite in despair "because it is now proved that a man,

take him for all in all, better qualified by intellectual power, energy

and purity of character, knowledge of men, a great combination of

personal qualities, a frank, high-spirited, manly bearing, keen sense of

honor, the power of attracting and winning men, united with a vast

experience in affairs, such as no man (but John Quincy Adams) now living

has had and no man in this country can ever have again,--I say it is

proved that a man better qualified by an extraordinary combination of

advantages to administer the government than any man now living, or any

man we can ever produce again, can be beaten by anybody. . . . . It has

taken forty years of public life to prepare such a man for the

Presidency, and the result is that he can be beaten by anybody,--Mr. Polk

is anybody,--he is Mr. Quelconque."

I do not venture to quote the most burning sentences of this impassioned

letter. It shows that Motley had not only become interested most

profoundly in the general movements of parties, but that he had followed

the course of political events which resulted in the election of Mr. Polk

with careful study, and that he was already looking forward to the revolt

of the slave States which occurred sixteen years later. The letter is

full of fiery eloquence, now and then extravagant and even violent in

expression, but throbbing with a generous heat which shows the excitable

spirit of a man who wishes to be proud of his country and does not wish

to keep his temper when its acts make him ashamed of it. He is disgusted

and indignant to the last degree at seeing "Mr. Quelconque" chosen over

the illustrious statesman who was his favorite candidate. But all his

indignation cannot repress a sense of humor which was one of his marked

characteristics. After fatiguing his vocabulary with hard usage, after

his unsparing denunciation of "the very dirty politics" which he finds

mixed up with our popular institutions, he says,--it must be remembered

that this was an offhand letter to one nearly connected with him,--

"All these things must in short, to use the energetic language of

the Balm of Columbia advertisement, 'bring every generous thinking

youth to that heavy sinking gloom which not even the loss of

property can produce, but only the loss of hair, which brings on

premature decay, causing many to shrink from being uncovered, and

even to shun society, to avoid the jests and sneers of their

acquaintances. The remainder of their lives is consequently spent

in retirement.'"

He continues:--

"Before dropping the subject, and to show the perfect purity of my

motives, I will add that I am not at all anxious about the

legislation of the new government. I desired the election of Clay

as a moral triumph, and because the administration of the country,

at this moment of ten thousand times more importance than its

legislation, would have been placed in pure, strong, and determined

hands."

Then comes a dash of that satirical and somewhat cynical way of feeling

which he had not as yet outgrown. He had been speaking about the general

want of attachment to the Union and the absence of the sentiment of

loyalty as bearing on the probable dissolution of the Union.

"I don't mean to express any opinions on these matters,--I haven't

got any. It seems to me that the best way is to look at the

hodge-podge, be good-natured if possible, and laugh,

'As from the height of contemplation

We view the feeble joints men totter on.'

I began a tremendous political career during the election, having

made two stump speeches of an hour and a half each,--after you went

away,--one in Dedham town-hall and one in Jamaica Plain, with such

eminent success that many invitations came to me from the

surrounding villages, and if I had continued in active political

life I might have risen to be vote-distributor, or fence-viewer, or

selectman, or hog-reeve, or something of the kind."

The letter from which the above passages are quoted gives the same

portrait of the writer, only seen in profile, as it were, which we have

already seen drawn in full face in the story of "Morton's Hope." It is

charged with that 'saeva indignatio' which at times verges on

misanthropic contempt for its objects, not unnatural to a high-spirited

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.

The readers who had shaken their heads over the unsuccessful story of

"Morton's Hope" were startled by the appearance of this manly and

scholarly essay. This young man, it seemed, had been studying,--studying

with careful accuracy, with broad purpose. He could paint a character

with the ruddy life-blood coloring it as warmly as it glows in the cheeks

of one of Van der Helst's burgomasters. He could sweep the horizon in a

wide general outlook, and manage his perspective and his lights and

shadows so as to place and accent his special subject with its due relief

and just relations. It was a sketch, or rather a study for a larger

picture, but it betrayed the hand of a master. The feeling of many was

that expressed in the words of Mr. Longfellow in his review of the

"Twice-Told Tales" of the unknown young writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne:

"When a new star rises in the heavens, people gaze after it for a season

with the naked eye, and with such telescopes as they may find. . . . This

star is but newly risen; and erelong the observation of numerous

star-gazers, perched up on arm-chairs and editor's tables, will inform

the world of its magnitude and its place in the heaven of"--not poetry in

this instance, but that serene and unclouded region of the firmament

where shine unchanging the names of Herodotus and Thucydides. Those who

had always believed in their brilliant schoolmate and friend at last felt

themselves justified in their faith. The artist that sent this unframed

picture to be hung in a corner of the literary gallery was equal to

larger tasks. There was but one voice in the circle that surrounded the

young essayist. He must redeem his pledge, he can and will redeem it, if

he will only follow the bent of his genius and grapple with the heroic

labor of writing a great history.

And this was the achievement he was already meditating.

In the mean time he was studying history for its facts and principles,

and fiction for its scenery and portraits. In "The North American Review"

for July, 1847, is a long and characteristic article on Balzac, of whom

he was an admirer, but with no blind worship. The readers of this great

story-teller, who was so long in obtaining recognition, who "made twenty

assaults upon fame and had forty books killed under him" before he

achieved success, will find his genius fully appreciated and fairly

weighed in this discriminating essay. A few brief extracts will show its

quality.

"Balzac is an artist, and only an artist. In his tranquil,

unimpassioned, remorseless diagnosis of morbid phenomena, in his

cool method of treating the morbid anatomy of the heart, in his

curiously accurate dissection of the passions, in the patient and

painful attention with which, stethoscope in hand, finger on pulse,

eye everywhere, you see him watching every symptom, alive to every

sound and every breath, and in the scientific accuracy with which he

portrays the phenomena which have been the subject of his

investigation,--in all this calm and conscientious study of nature

he often reminds us of Goethe. Balzac, however, is only an artist

. . . He is neither moral nor immoral, but a calm and profound

observer of human society and human passions, and a minute, patient,

and powerful delineator of scenes and characters in the world before

his eyes. His readers must moralize for themselves. . . . It

is, perhaps, his defective style more than anything else which will

prevent his becoming a classic, for style above all other qualities

seems to embalm for posterity. As for his philosophy, his

principles, moral, political, or social, we repeat that he seems to

have none whatever. He looks for the picturesque and the striking.

He studies sentiments and sensations from an artistic point of view.

He is a physiognomist, a physiologist, a bit of an anatomist, a bit

of a mesmerist, a bit of a geologist, a Flemish painter, an

upholsterer, a micrological, misanthropical, sceptical philosopher;

but he is no moralist, and certainly no reformer."

Another article contributed by Mr. Motley to "The North American Review"

is to be found in the number for October, 1849. It is nominally a review

of Talvi's (Mrs. Robinson's) "Geschichte der Colonisation von New

England," but in reality an essay on the Polity of the Puritans,--an

historical disquisition on the principles of self-government evolved in

New England, broad in its views, eloquent in its language. Its spirit is

thoroughly American, and its estimate of the Puritan character is not

narrowed by the nearsighted liberalism which sees the past in the

pitiless light of the present,--which looks around at high noon and finds

fault with early dawn for its long and dark shadows. Here is a sentence

or two from the article:--

"With all the faults of the system devised by the Puritans, it was a

practical system. With all their foibles, with all their teasing,

tyrannical, and arbitrary notions, the Pilgrims were lovers of

liberty as well as sticklers for authority. . . . Nowhere can a

better description of liberty be found than that given by Winthrop,

in his defence of himself before the General Court on a charge of

arbitrary conduct. 'Nor would I have you mistake your own liberty,'

he says. 'There is a freedom of doing what we list, without regard

to law or justice; this liberty is indeed inconsistent with

authority; but civil, moral, and federal liberty consists in every

man's enjoying his property and having the benefit of the laws of

his country; which is very consistent with a due subjection to the

civil magistrate.' . . .

"We enjoy an inestimable advantage in America. One can be a

republican, a democrat, without being a radical. A radical, one who

would uproot, is a man whose trade is dangerous to society. Here is

but little to uproot. The trade cannot flourish. All classes are

conservative by necessity, for none can wish to change the structure

of our polity. . .

"The country without a past cannot be intoxicated by visions of the

past of other lands. Upon this absence of the past it seems to us

that much of the security of our institutions depends. Nothing

interferes with the development of what is now felt to be the true

principle of government, the will of the people legitimately

expressed. To establish that great truth, nothing was to be torn

down, nothing to be uprooted. It grew up in New England out of the

seed unconsciously planted by the first Pilgrims, was not crushed

out by the weight of a thousand years of error spread over the whole

continent, and the Revolution was proclaimed and recognized."

VIII.

1847-1849. AEt. 33-35.

JOSEPH LEWIS STACKPOLE, THE FRIEND OF MOTLEY. HIS SUDDEN DEATH.--MOTLEY

IN THE MASSACHUSETTS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.--SECOND NOVEL,

"MERRY-MOUNT, A ROMANCE OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY."

The intimate friendships of early manhood are not very often kept up

among our people. The eager pursuit of fortune, position, office,

separates young friends, and the indoor home life imprisons them in the

domestic circle so generally that it is quite exceptional to find two

grown men who are like brothers,--or rather unlike most brothers, in

being constantly found together. An exceptional instance of such a more

than fraternal relation was seen in the friendship of Mr. Motley and Mr.

Joseph Lewis Stackpole. Mr. William Amory, who knew them both well, has

kindly furnished me with some recollections, which I cannot improve by

changing his own language.

"Their intimacy began in Europe, and they returned to this country

in 1835. In 1837 they married sisters, and this cemented their

intimacy, which continued to Stackpole's death in 1847. The

contrast in the temperament of the two friends--the one sensitive

and irritable, and the other always cool and good-natured--only

increased their mutual attachment to each other, and Motley's

dependence upon Stackpole. Never were two friends more constantly

together or more affectionately fond of each other. As Stackpole

was about eight years older than Motley, and much less impulsive and

more discreet, his death was to his friend irreparable, and at the

time an overwhelming blow."

Mr. Stackpole was a man of great intelligence, of remarkable personal

attractions, and amiable character. His death was a loss to Motley even

greater than he knew, for he needed just such a friend, older, calmer,

more experienced in the ways of the world, and above all capable of

thoroughly understanding him and exercising a wholesome influence over

his excitable nature without the seeming of a Mentor preaching to a

Telemachus. Mr. Stackpole was killed by a railroad accident on the 20th

of July, 1847.

In the same letter Mr. Amory refers to a very different experience in Mr.

Motley's life,--his one year of service as a member of the Massachusetts

House of Representatives, 1849.

"In respect to the one term during which he was a member of the

Massachusetts House of Representatives, I can recall only one thing,

to which he often and laughingly alluded. Motley, as the Chairman

of the Committee on Education, made, as he thought, a most masterly

report. It was very elaborate, and, as he supposed, unanswerable;

but Boutwell, then a young man from some country town [Groton,

Mass.], rose, and as Motley always said, demolished the report, so

that he was unable to defend it against the attack. You can imagine

his disgust, after the pains he had taken to render it unassailable,

to find himself, as he expressed it, 'on his own dunghill,'

ignominiously beaten. While the result exalted his opinion of the

speech-making faculty of a Representative of a common school

education, it at the same time cured him of any ambition for

political promotion in Massachusetts."

To my letter of inquiry about this matter, Hon. George S. Boutwell

courteously returned the following answer:--

BOSTON, October 14, 1878.

MY DEAR SIR,--As my memory serves me, Mr. Motley was a member of the

Massachusetts House of Representatives in the year 1847 1849. It

may be well to consult the manual for that year. I recollect the

controversy over the report from the Committee on Education.

His failure was not due to his want of faculty or to the vigor of

his opponents.

In truth he espoused the weak side of the question and the unpopular

one also. His proposition was to endow the colleges at the expense

of the fund for the support of the common schools. Failure was

inevitable. Neither Webster nor Choate could have carried the bill.

Very truly,

GEO. S. BOUTWELL.

No one could be more ready and willing to recognize his own failures than

Motley. He was as honest and manly, perhaps I may say as sympathetic with

the feeling of those about him, on this occasion, as was Charles Lamb,

who, sitting with his sister in the front of the pit, on the night when

his farce was damned at its first representation, gave way to the common

feeling, and hissed and hooted lustily with the others around him. It was

what might be expected from his honest and truthful nature, sometimes too

severe in judging itself.

The commendation bestowed upon Motley's historical essays in "The North

American Review" must have gone far towards compensating him for the ill

success of his earlier venture. It pointed clearly towards the field in

which he was to gather his laurels. And it was in the year following the

publication of the first essay, or about that time (1846), that he began

collecting materials for a history of Holland. Whether to tell the story

of men that have lived and of events that have happened, or to create the

characters and invent the incidents of an imaginary tale be the higher

task, we need not stop to discuss. But the young author was just now like

the great actor in Sir Joshua's picture, between the allurements of

Thalia and Melpomene, still doubtful whether he was to be a romancer or a

historian.

The tale of which the title is given at the beginning of this section had

been written several years before the date of its publication. It is a

great advance in certain respects over the first novel, but wants the

peculiar interest which belonged to that as a partially autobiographical

memoir. The story is no longer disjointed and impossible. It is carefully

studied in regard to its main facts. It has less to remind us of "Vivian

Grey" and "Pelham," and more that recalls "Woodstock" and "Kenilworth."

The personages were many of them historical, though idealized; the

occurrences were many of them such as the record authenticated; the

localities were drawn largely from nature. The story betrays marks of

haste or carelessness in some portions, though others are elaborately

studied. His preface shows that the reception of his first book had made

him timid and sensitive about the fate of the second, and explains and

excuses what might be found fault with, to disarm the criticism he had

some reason to fear.

That old watch-dog of our American literature, "The North American

Review," always ready with lambent phrases in stately "Articles" for

native talent of a certain pretension, and wagging its appendix of

"Critical Notices" kindly at the advent of humbler merit, treated

"Merry-Mount" with the distinction implied in a review of nearly twenty

pages. This was a great contrast to the brief and slighting notice of

"Morton's Hope." The reviewer thinks the author's descriptive power

wholly exceeds his conception of character and invention of

circumstances.

"He dwells, perhaps, too long and fondly upon his imagination of the

landscape as it was before the stillness of the forest had been

broken by the axe of the settler; but the picture is so finely

drawn, with so much beauty of language and purity of sentiment, that

we cannot blame him for lingering upon the scene. . . . The

story is not managed with much skill, but it has variety enough of

incident and character, and is told with so much liveliness that few

will be inclined to lay it down before reaching the conclusion. .

. . The writer certainly needs practice in elaborating the details

of a consistent and interesting novel; but in many respects he is

well qualified for the task, and we shall be glad to meet him again

on the half-historical ground he has chosen. His present work,

certainly, is not a fair specimen of what he is able to accomplish,

and its failure, or partial success, ought only to inspirit him for

further effort."

The "half-historical ground" he had chosen had already led him to the

entrance into the broader domain of history. The "further effort" for

which he was to be inspirited had already begun. He had been for some

time, as was before mentioned, collecting materials for the work which

was to cast all his former attempts into the kindly shadow of oblivion,

save when from time to time the light of his brilliant after success is

thrown upon them to illustrate the path by which it was at length

attained.

IX.

1850. AEt. 36.

PLAN OF A HISTORY.--LETTERS.

The reputation of Mr. Prescott was now coextensive with the realm of

scholarship. The histories of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella and of

the conquest of Mexico had met with a reception which might well tempt

the ambition of a young writer to emulate it, but which was not likely to

be awarded to any second candidate who should enter the field in rivalry

with the great and universally popular historian. But this was the field

on which Mr. Motley was to venture.

After he had chosen the subject of the history he contemplated, he found

that Mr. Prescott was occupied with a kindred one, so that there might be

too near a coincidence between them. I must borrow from Mr. Ticknor's

beautiful life of Prescott the words which introduce a letter of Motley's

to Mr. William Amory, who has kindly allowed me also to make use of it.

"The moment, therefore, that he [Mr. Motley] was aware of this

condition of things, and the consequent possibility that there might

be an untoward interference in their plans, he took the same frank

and honorable course with Mr. Prescott that Mr. Prescott had taken

in relation to Mr. Irving, when he found that they had both been

contemplating a 'History of the Conquest of Mexico.' The result was

the same. Mr. Prescott, instead of treating the matter as an

interference, earnestly encouraged Mr. Motley to go on, and placed

at his disposition such of the books in his library as could be most

useful to him. How amply and promptly he did it, Mr. Motley's own

account will best show. It is in a letter dated at Rome, 26th

February, 1859, the day he heard of Mr. Prescott's death, and was

addressed to his intimate friend, Mr. William Amory, of Boston, Mr.

Prescott's much-loved brother-in-law."