The recall of a minister under such circumstances is an unusual if not an

unprecedented occurrence. The government which appoints a citizen to

represent the country at a foreign court assumes a very serious

obligation to him. The next administration may turn him out and nothing

will be thought of it. He may be obliged to ask for his passports and

leave all at once if war is threatened between his own country and that

which he represents. He may, of course, be recalled for gross misconduct.

But his dismissal is very serious matter to him personally, and not to be

thought of on the ground of passion or caprice. Marriage is a simple

business, but divorce is a very different thing. The world wants to know

the reason of it; the law demands its justification. It was a great blow

to Mr. Motley, a cause of indignation to those who were interested in

him, a surprise and a mystery to the world in general.

When he, his friends, and the public, all startled by this unexpected

treatment, looked to find an explanation of it, one was found which

seemed to many quite sufficient. Mr. Sumner had been prominent among

those who had favored his appointment. A very serious breach had taken

place between the President and Mr. Sumner on the important San Domingo

question. It was a quarrel, in short, neither more nor less, at least so

far as the President was concerned. The proposed San Domingo treaty had

just been rejected by the Senate, on the thirtieth day of June, and

immediately thereupon,--the very next day,--the letter requesting Mr.

Motley's resignation was issued by the executive. This fact was

interpreted as implying something more than a mere coincidence. It was

thought that Sumner's friend, who had been supported by him as a

candidate for high office, who shared many of his political ideas and

feelings, who was his intimate associate, his fellow-townsman, his

companion in scholarship and cultivation, his sympathetic co-laborer in

many ways, had been accounted and dealt with as the ally of an enemy, and

that the shaft which struck to the heart of the sensitive envoy had

glanced from the 'aes triplex' of the obdurate Senator.

Mr. Motley wrote a letter to the Secretary of State immediately after his

recall, in which he reviewed his relations with the government from the

time of his taking office, and showed that no sufficient reason could be

assigned for the treatment to which he had been subjected. He referred

finally to the public rumor which assigned the President's hostility to

his friend Sumner, growing out of the San Domingo treaty question, as the

cause of his own removal, and to the coincidence between the dates of the

rejection of the treaty and his dismissal, with an evident belief that

these two occurrences were connected by something more than accident.

To this, a reply was received from the Secretary of State's office,

signed by Mr. Fish, but so objectionable in its tone and expressions that

it has been generally doubted whether the paper could claim anything more

of the secretary's hand than his signature. It travelled back to the old

record of the conversation with Lord Clarendon, more than a year and a

half before, took up the old exceptions, warmed them over into

grievances, and joined with them whatever the 'captatores verborum,' not

extinct since Daniel Webster's time, could add to their number. This was

the letter which was rendered so peculiarly offensive by a most

undignified comparison which startled every well-bred reader. No answer

was possible to such a letter, and the matter rested until the death of

Mr. Motley caused it to be brought up once more for judgment.

The Honorable John Jay, in his tribute to the memory of Mr. Motley, read

at a meeting of the New York Historical Society, vindicated his character

against the attacks of the late executive in such a way as to leave an

unfavorable impression as to the course of the government. Objection was

made on this account to placing the tribute upon the minutes of the

society. This led to a publication by Mr. Jay, entitled "Motley's Appeal

to History," in which the propriety of the society's action is

questioned, and the wrong done to him insisted upon and further

illustrated.

The defence could not have fallen into better hands. Bearing a name which

is, in itself, a title to the confidence of the American people, a

diplomatist familiar with the rights, the customs, the traditions, the

courtesies, which belong to the diplomatic service, the successor of Mr.

Motley at Vienna, and therefore familiar with his official record, not

self-made, which too commonly means half-made, but with careful training

added to the instincts to which he had a right by inheritance, he could

not allow the memory of such a scholar, of such a high-minded lover of

his country, of so true a gentleman as Mr. Motley, to remain without

challenge under the stigma of official condemnation. I must refer to Mr.

Jay's memorial tribute as printed in the newspapers of the day, and to

his "Appeal" published in "The International Review," for his convincing

presentation of the case, and content myself with a condensed statement

of the general and special causes of complaint against Mr. Motley, and

the explanations which suggest themselves, as abundantly competent to

show the insufficiency of the reasons alleged by the government as an

excuse for the manner in which he was treated.

The grounds of complaint against Mr. Motley are to be looked for:--

1. In the letter of Mr. Fish to Mr. Moran, of December 30, 1870.

2. In Mr. Bancroft Davis's letter to the New York "Herald" of January 4,

1878, entitled, "Mr. Sumner, the Alabama Claims and their Settlement."

3. The reported conversations of General Grant.

4. The reported conversations of Mr. Fish.

In considering Mr. Fish's letter, we must first notice its animus. The

manner in which Dickens's two old women are brought in is not only

indecorous, but it shows a state of feeling from which nothing but harsh

interpretation of every questionable expression of Mr. Motley's was to be

expected.

There is not the least need of maintaining the perfect fitness and

rhetorical felicity of every phrase and every word used by him in his

interview with Lord Clarendon. It is not to be expected that a minister,

when about to hold a conversation with a representative of the government

to which he is accredited, will commit his instructions to memory and

recite them, like a school-boy "speaking his piece." He will give them

more or less in his own language, amplifying, it may be, explaining,

illustrating, at any rate paraphrasing in some degree, but endeavoring to

convey an idea of their essential meaning. In fact, as any one can see, a

conversation between two persons must necessarily imply a certain amount

of extemporization on the part of both. I do not believe any long and

important conference was ever had between two able men without each of

them feeling that he had not spoken exactly in all respects as he would

if he could say all over again.

Doubtless, therefore, Mr. Motley's report of his conversation shows that

some of his expressions might have been improved, and others might as

well have been omitted. A man does not change his temperament on taking

office. General Jackson still swore "by the Eternal," and his illustrious

military successor of a more recent period seems, by his own showing, to

have been able to sudden impulses of excitement. It might be said of

Motley, as it was said of Shakespeare by Ben Jonson, "aliquando

sufflaminandus erat." Yet not too much must be made of this concession.

Only a determination to make out a case could, as it seems to me, have

framed such an indictment as that which the secretary constructed by

stringing together a slender list of pretended peccadillos. One instance

will show the extreme slightness which characterizes many of the grounds

of inculpation:--

The instructions say, "The government, in rejecting the recent

convention, abandons neither its own claims nor those of its citizens,"

etc.

Mr. Motley said, in the course of his conversation, "At present, the

United States government, while withdrawing neither its national claims

nor the claims of its individual citizens against the British

government," etc.

Mr. Fish says, "The determination of this government not to abandon its

claims nor those of its citizens was stated parenthetically, and in such

a subordinate way as not necessarily to attract the attention of Lord

Clarendon."

What reported conversation can stand a captious criticism like this? Are

there not two versions of the ten commandments which were given out in

the thunder and smoke of Sinai, and would the secretary hold that this

would have been a sufficient reason to recall Moses from his "Divine

Legation" at the court of the Almighty?

There are certain expressions which, as Mr. Fish shows them apart from

their connection, do very certainly seem in bad taste, if not actually

indiscreet and unjustifiable. Let me give an example:--

"Instead of expressing the hope entertained by this government that

there would be an early, satisfactory, and friendly settlement of

the questions at issue, he volunteered the unnecessary, and from the

manner in which it was thrust in, the highly objectionable statement

that the United States government had no insidious purposes,'" etc.

This sounds very badly as Mr. Fish puts it; let us see how it stands in

its proper connection:--

"He [Lord Clarendon] added with some feeling, that in his opinion it

would be highly objectionable that the question should be hung up on

a peg, to be taken down at some convenient moment for us, when it

might be difficult for the British government to enter upon its

solution, and when they might go into the debate at a disadvantage.

These were, as nearly as I can remember, his words, and I replied

very earnestly that I had already answered that question when I said

that my instructions were to propose as brief a delay as would

probably be requisite for the cooling of passions and for producing

the calm necessary for discussing the defects of the old treaty and

a basis for a new one. The United States government had no

insidious purposes," etc.

Is it not evident that Lord Clarendon suggested the idea which Mr. Motley

repelled as implying an insidious mode of action? Is it not just as clear

that Mr. Fish's way of reproducing the expression without the insinuation

which called it forth is a practical misstatement which does Mr. Motley

great wrong?

One more example of the method of wringing a dry cloth for drops of

evidence ought to be enough to show the whole spirit of the paper.

Mr. Fish, in his instructions:--

"It might, indeed, well have occurred in the event of the selection

by lot of the arbitrator or umpire in different cases, involving

however precisely the same principles, that different awards,

resting upon antagonistic principles, might have been made."

Mr. Motley, in the conversation with Lord Clarendon:--

"I called his lordship's attention to your very judicious suggestion

that the throwing of the dice for umpires might bring about opposite

decisions in cases arising out of identical principles. He agreed

entirely that no principle was established by the treaty, but that

the throwing of dice or drawing of lots was not a new invention on

that occasion, but a not uncommon method in arbitrations. I only

expressed the opinion that such an aleatory process seemed an

unworthy method in arbitrations," etc.

Mr. Fish, in his letter to Mr. Moran:--

"That he had in his mind at that interview something else than his

letter of instructions from this department would appear to be

evident, when he says that 'he called his lordship's attention to

your [my] very judicious suggestion that the throwing of dice for

umpire might bring about opposite decisions.' The instructions

which Mr. Motley received from me contained no suggestion about

throwing of dice.' That idea is embraced in the suggestive words

'aleatory process' (adopted by Mr. Motley), but previously applied

in a speech made in the Senate on the question of ratifying the

treaty."

Charles Sumner's Speech on the Johnson-Clarendon Treaty, April 13, 1869:

"In the event of failure to agree, the arbitrator is determined 'by

lot' out of two persons named by each side. Even if this aleatory

proceeding were a proper device in the umpirage of private claims,

it is strongly inconsistent with the solemnity which belongs to the

present question."

It is "suggestive" that the critical secretary, so keen in detecting

conversational inaccuracies, having but two words to quote from a printed

document, got one of them wrong. But this trivial comment must not lead

the careful reader to neglect to note how much is made of what is really

nothing at all. The word aleatory, whether used in its original and

limited sense, or in its derived extension as a technical term of the

civil law, was appropriate and convenient; one especially likely to be

remembered by any person who had read Mr. Sumner's speech,--and everybody

had read it; the secretary himself doubtless got the suggestion of

determining the question "by lot" from it. What more natural than that it

should be used again when the subject of appealing to chance came up in

conversation? It "was an excellent good word before it was ill-sorted,"

and we were fortunate in having a minister who was scholar enough to know

what it meant. The language used by Mr. Motley conveyed the idea of his

instructions plainly enough, and threw in a compliment to their author

which should have saved this passage at least from the wringing process.

The example just given is, like the concession of belligerency to the

insurgents by Great Britain, chiefly important as "showing animus."

It is hardly necessary to bring forward other instances of virtual

misrepresentation. If Mr. Motley could have talked his conversation over

again, he would very probably have changed some expressions. But he felt

bound to repeat the interview exactly as it occurred, with all the errors

to which its extemporaneous character exposed it. When a case was to be

made out against him, the secretary wrote, December 30, 1870:

"Well might he say, as he did in a subsequent dispatch on the 15th

of July, 1869, that he had gone beyond the strict letter of his

instructions. He might have added, in direct opposition to their

temper and spirit."

Of the same report the secretary had said, June 28, 1869: "Your general

presentation and treatment of the several subjects discussed in that

interview meet the approval of this department." This general approval is

qualified by mild criticism of a single statement as not having been

conveyed in "precise conformity" to the President's view. The minister

was told he might be well content to rest the question on the very

forcible presentation he had made of the American side of the question,

and that if there were expressions used stronger than were required by

his instructions, they were in the right direction. The mere fact that a

minute of this conversation was confidentially submitted to Lord

Clarendon in order that our own government might have his authority for

the accuracy of the record, which was intended exclusively for its own

use, and that this circumstance was overlooked and not reported to the

government until some weeks afterward, are the additional charges against

Mr. Motley. The submission of the dispatch containing an account of the

interview, the secretary says, is not inconsistent with diplomatic usage,

but it is inconsistent with the duty of a minister not to inform his

government of that submission. "Mr. Motley submitted the draft of his No.

8 to Lord Clarendon, and failed to communicate that fact to his

government." He did inform Mr. Fish, at any rate, on the 30th of July,

and alleged "inadvertence" as the reason for his omission to do it

before.

Inasmuch as submitting the dispatch was not inconsistent with diplomatic

usage, nothing seems left to find fault with but the not very long delay

in mentioning the fact, or in his making the note "private and

confidential," as is so frequently done in diplomatic correspondence.

Such were the grounds of complaint. On the strength of the conversation

which had met with the general approval of the government, tempered by

certain qualifications, and of the omission to report immediately to the

government the fact of its verification by Lord Clarendon, the secretary

rests the case against Mr. Motley. On these grounds it was that,

according to him, the President withdrew all right to discuss the Alabama

question from the minister whose dismissal was now only a question of

time. But other evidence comes in here.

Mr. Motley says:--

"It was, as I supposed, understood before my departure for England,

although not publicly announced, that the so-called Alabama

negotiations, whenever renewed, should be conducted at Washington,

in case of the consent of the British government."

Mr. Sumner says, in his "Explanation in Reply to an Assault:"--

"The secretary in a letter to me at Boston, dated at Washington,

October 9, 1869, informs the that the discussion of the question was

withdrawn from London 'because (the italics are the secretary's) we

think that when renewed it can be carried on here with a better

prospect of settlement, than where the late attempt at a convention

which resulted so disastrously and was conducted so strangely was

had;' and what the secretary thus wrote he repeated in conversation

when we met, carefully making the transfer to Washington depend upon

our advantage here, from the presence of the Senate,--thus showing

that the pretext put forth to wound Mr. Motley was an afterthought."

Again we may fairly ask how the government came to send a dispatch like

that of September 25, 1869, in which the views and expressions for which

Mr. Motley's conversation had been criticised were so nearly reproduced,

and with such emphasis that Mr. Motley says, in a letter to me, dated

April 8, 1871, "It not only covers all the ground which I ever took, but

goes far beyond it. No one has ever used stronger language to the British

government than is contained in that dispatch. . . . It is very able and

well worth your reading. Lord Clarendon called it to me 'Sumner's speech

over again.' It was thought by the English cabinet to have 'out-Sumnered

Sumner,' and now our government, thinking that every one in the United

States had forgotten the dispatch, makes believe that I was removed

because my sayings and doings in England were too much influenced by

Sumner!" Mr. Motley goes on to speak of the report that an offer of his

place in England was made to Sumner "to get him out of the way of San

Domingo." The facts concerning this offer are now sufficiently known to

the public.

Here I must dismiss Mr. Fish's letter to Mr. Moran, having, as I trust,

sufficiently shown the spirit in which it was written and the strained

interpretations and manifest overstatements by which it attempts to make

out its case against Mr. Motley. I will not parade the two old women,

whose untimely and unseemly introduction into the dress-circle of

diplomacy was hardly to have been expected of the high official whose

name is at the bottom of this paper. They prove nothing, they disprove

nothing, they illustrate nothing--except that a statesman may forget

himself. Neither will I do more than barely allude to the unfortunate

reference to the death of Lord Clarendon as connected with Mr. Motley's

removal, so placidly disposed of by a sentence or two in the London

"Times" of January 24, 1871. I think we may consider ourselves ready for

the next witness.

Mr. J. C. Bancroft Davis, Assistant Secretary of State under President

Grant and Secretary Fish, wrote a letter to the New York "Herald," under

the date of January 4, 1878, since reprinted as a pamphlet and entitled

"Mr. Sumner, the Alabama Claims and their Settlement." Mr. Sumner was

never successfully attacked when living,--except with a bludgeon,--and

his friends have more than sufficiently vindicated him since his death.

But Mr. Motley comes in for his share of animadversion in Mr. Davis's

letter. He has nothing of importance to add to Mr. Fish's criticisms on

the interview with Lord Clarendon. Only he brings out the head and front

of Mr. Motley's offending by italicizing three very brief passages from

his conversation at this interview; not discreetly, as it seems to me,

for they will not bear the strain that is put upon them. These are the

passages:--

1. "but that such, measures must always be taken with a full view of the

grave responsibilities assumed." 2. "and as being the fountain head of

the disasters which had been caused to the American people." 3. "as the

fruits of the proclamation."

1. It is true that nothing was said of responsibility in Mr. Motley's

instructions. But the idea was necessarily involved in their statements.

For if, as Mr. Motley's instructions say, the right of a power "to define

its own relations," etc., when a civil conflict has arisen in another

state depends on its (the conflict's) having "attained a sufficient

complexity, magnitude, and completeness," inasmuch as that Power has to

judge whether it has or has not fulfilled these conditions, and is of

course liable to judge wrong, every such act of judgment must be attended

with grave responsibilities. The instructions say that "the necessity and

propriety of the original concession of belligerency by Great Britain at

the time it was made have been contested and are not admitted." It

follows beyond dispute that Great Britain may in this particular case

have incurred grave responsibilities; in fact, the whole negotiations

implied as much. Perhaps Mr. Motley need not have used the word

"responsibilities." But considering that the government itself said in

dispatch No. 70, September 25, 1869, "The President does not deny, on the

contrary he maintains, that every sovereign power decides for itself on

its responsibility whether or not it will, at a given time, accord the

status of belligerency," etc., it was hardly worth while to use italics

about Mr. Motley's employment of the same language as constituting a

grave cause of offence.

2. Mr. Motley's expression, "as being the fountain head of the

disasters," is a conversational paraphrase of the words of his

instructions, "as it shows the beginning and the animus of that course of

conduct which resulted so disastrously," which is not "in precise

conformity" with his instructions, but is just such a variation as is to

be expected when one is talking with another and using the words that

suggest themselves at the moment, just as the familiar expression, "hung

up on a peg," probably suggested itself to Lord Clarendon.

3. "The fruits of the proclamation" is so inconsiderable a variation on

the text of the instructions, "supplemented by acts causing direct

damage," that the secretary's hint about want of precise conformity seems

hardly to have been called for.

It is important to notice this point in the instructions: With other

powers Mr. Motley was to take the position that the "recognition of the

insurgents' state of war" was made "no ground of complaint;" with Great

Britain that the cause of grievance was "not so much" placed upon the

issuance of this recognition as upon her conduct under, and subsequent

to, such recognition.

There is no need of maintaining the exact fitness of every expression

used by Mr. Motley. But any candid person who will carefully read the

government's dispatch No. 70, dated September 25, 1869, will see that a

government holding such language could find nothing in Mr. Motley's

expressions in a conversation held at his first official interview to

visit with official capital punishment more than a year afterwards. If

Mr. Motley had, as it was pretended, followed Sumner, Mr. Fish had

"out-Sumnered" the Senator himself.

Mr. Davis's pamphlet would hardly be complete without a mysterious letter

from an unnamed writer, whether a faithless friend, a disguised enemy, a

secret emissary, or an injudicious alarmist, we have no means of judging

for ourselves. The minister appears to have been watched by somebody in

London, as he was in Vienna. This somebody wrote a private letter in

which he expressed "fear and regret that Mr. Motley's bearing in his

social intercourse was throwing obstacles in the way of a future

settlement." The charge as mentioned in Mr. Davis's letter is hardly

entitled to our attention. Mr. Sumner considered it the work of an enemy,

and the recollection of the M'Crackin letter might well have made the

government cautious of listening to complaints of such a character. This

Somebody may have been one whom we should call Nobody. We cannot help

remembering how well 'Outis' served 'Oduxseus' of old, when he was

puzzled to extricate himself from an embarrassing position. 'Stat nominis

umbra' is a poor showing for authority to support an attack on a public

servant exposed to every form of open and insidious abuse from those who

are prejudiced against his person or his birthplace, who are jealous of

his success, envious of his position, hostile to his politics, dwarfed by

his reputation, or hate him by the divine right of idiosyncrasy, always

liable, too, to questioning comment from well-meaning friends who happen

to be suspicious or sensitive in their political or social relations.

The reported sayings of General Grant and of Mr. Fish to the

correspondents who talked with them may be taken for what they are worth.

They sound naturally enough to have come from the speakers who are said

to have uttered them. I quote the most important part of the Edinburgh

letter, September 11, 1877, to the New York "Herald." These are the words

attributed to General Grant:--

"Mr. Motley was certainly a very able, very honest gentleman, fit to

hold any official position. But he knew long before he went out

that he would have to go. When I was making these appointments, Mr.

Sumner came to me and asked me to appoint Mr. Motley as minister to

the court of St. James. I told him I would, and did. Soon after

Mr. Sumner made that violent speech about the Alabama claims, and

the British government was greatly offended. Mr. Sumner was at the

time chairman of the committee on foreign affairs. Mr. Motley had

to be instructed. The instructions were prepared very carefully,

and after Governor Fish and I had gone over them for the last time I

wrote an addendum charging him that above all things he should

handle the subject of the Alabama claims with the greatest delicacy.

Mr. Motley instead of obeying his explicit instructions,

deliberately fell in line with Sumner, and thus added insult to the

previous injury. As soon as I heard of it I went over to the State

Department and told Governor Fish to dismiss Motley at once. I was

very angry indeed, and I have been sorry many a time since that I

did not stick to my first determination. Mr. Fish advised delay

because of Sumner's position in the Senate and attitude on the

treaty question. We did not want to stir him up just then. We

dispatched a note of severe censure to Motley at once and ordered

him to abstain from any further connection with that question. We

thereupon commenced negotiations with the British minister at

Washington, and the result was the joint high commission and the

Geneva award. I supposed Mr. Motley would be manly enough to resign

after that snub, but he kept on till he was removed. Mr. Sumner

promised me that he would vote for the treaty. But when it was

before the Senate he did all he could to beat it."

General Grant talked again at Cairo, in Egypt.

"Grant then referred to the statement published at an interview with

him in Scotland, and said the publication had some omissions and

errors. He had no ill-will towards Mr. Motley, who, like other

estimable men, made mistakes, and Motley made a mistake which made

him an improper person to hold office under me."

"It is proper to say of me that I killed Motley, or that I made war

upon Sumner for not supporting the annexation of San Domingo. But

if I dare to answer that I removed Motley from the highest

considerations of duty as an executive; if I presume to say that he

made a mistake in his office which made him no longer useful to the

country; if Fish has the temerity to hint that Sumner's temper was

so unfortunate that business relations with him became impossible,

we are slandering the dead."

"Nothing but Mortimer." Those who knew both men--the Ex-President and the

late Senator--would agree, I do not doubt, that they would not be the

most promising pair of human beings to make harmonious members of a

political happy family. "Cedant arma togae," the life-long sentiment of

Sumner, in conflict with "Stand fast and stand sure," the well-known

device of the clan of Grant, reminds one of the problem of an

irresistible force in collision with an insuperable resistance. But the

President says,--or is reported as saying,--"I may be blamed for my

opposition to Mr. Sumner's tactics, but I was not guided so much by

reason of his personal hatred of myself, as I was by a desire to protect

our national interests in diplomatic affairs."

"It would be useless," says Mr. Davis in his letter to the "Herald," "to

enter into a controversy whether the President may or may not have been

influenced in the final determination of the moment for requesting

Motley's resignation by the feeling caused by Sumner's personal hostility

and abuse of himself." Unfortunately, this controversy had been entered

into, and the idleness of suggesting any relation of cause and effect

between Mr. Motley's dismissal and the irritation produced in the

President's mind by the rejection of the San Domingo treaty--which

rejection was mainly due to Motley's friend Sumner's opposition

--strongly insisted upon in a letter signed by the Secretary of State.

Too strongly, for here it was that he failed to remember what was due to

his office, to himself, and to the gentleman of whom he was writing; if

indeed it was the secretary's own hand which held the pen, and not

another's.

We might as well leave out the wrath of Achilles from the Iliad, as the

anger of the President with Sumner from the story of Motley's dismissal.

The sad recital must always begin with M-----------. He was, he is

reported as saying, "very angry indeed" with Motley because he had,

fallen in line with Sumner. He couples them together in his conversation

as closely as Chang and Eng were coupled. The death of Lord Clarendon

would have covered up the coincidence between the rejection of the San

Domingo treaty and Mr. Motley's dismissal very neatly, but for the

inexorable facts about its date, as revealed by the London "Times." It

betrays itself as an afterthought, and its failure as a defence reminds

us too nearly of the trial in which Mr. Webster said suicide is

confession.

It is not strange that the spurs of the man who had so lately got out of

the saddle should catch in the scholastic robe of the man on the floor of

the Senate. But we should not have looked for any such antagonism between

the Secretary of State and the envoy to Great Britain. On the contrary,

they must have had many sympathies, and it must have cost the secretary

pain, as he said it did, to be forced to communicate with Mr. Moran

instead of with Mr. Motley.

He, too, was inquired of by one of the emissaries of the American Unholy

Inquisition. His evidence is thus reported:

"The reason for Mr. Motley's removal was found in considerations of

state. He misrepresented the government on the Alabama question,

especially in the two speeches made by him before his arrival at his

post."

These must be the two speeches made to the American and the Liverpool

chambers of commerce. If there is anything in these short addresses

beyond those civil generalities which the occasion called out, I have

failed to find it. If it was in these that the reason of Mr. Motley's

removal was to be looked for, it is singular that they are not mentioned

in the secretary's letter to Mr. Moran, or by Mr. Davis in his letter to

the New York "Herald." They must have been as unsuccessful as myself in

the search after anything in these speeches which could be construed into

misinterpretation of the government on the Alabama question.

We may much more readily accept "considerations of state" as a reason for

Mr. Motley's removal. Considerations of state have never yet failed the

axe or the bowstring when a reason for the use of those convenient

implements was wanted, and they are quite equal to every emergency which

can arise in a republican autocracy. But for the very reason that a

minister is absolutely in the power of his government, the manner in

which that power is used is always open to the scrutiny, and, if it has

been misused, to the condemnation, of a tribunal higher than itself; a

court that never goes out of office, and which no personal feelings, no

lapse of time, can silence.

The ostensible grounds on which Mr. Motley was recalled are plainly

insufficient to account for the action of the government. If it was in

great measure a manifestation of personal feeling on the part of the high

officials by whom and through whom the act was accomplished, it was a

wrong which can never be repaired and never sufficiently regretted.

Stung by the slanderous report of an anonymous eavesdropper to whom the

government of the day was not ashamed to listen, he had quitted Vienna,

too hastily, it may be, but wounded, indignant, feeling that he had been

unworthily treated. The sudden recall from London, on no pretext whatever

but an obsolete and overstated incident which had ceased to have any

importance, was under these circumstances a deadly blow. It fell upon

"the new-healed wound of malice," and though he would not own it, and

bore up against it, it was a shock from which he never fully recovered.

"I hope I am one of those," he writes to me from the Hague, in 1872, "who

'fortune's buffets and rewards can take with equal thanks.' I am quite

aware that I have had far more than I deserve of political honors, and

they might have had my post as a voluntary gift on my part had they

remembered that I was an honorable man, and not treated me as a detected

criminal deserves to be dealt with."

Mr. Sumner naturally felt very deeply what he considered the great wrong

done to his friend. He says:--

"How little Mr. Motley merited anything but respect and courtesy

from the secretary is attested by all who know his eminent position

in London, and the service he rendered to his country. Already the

London press, usually slow to praise Americans when strenuous for

their country, has furnished its voluntary testimony. The 'Daily

News' of August 16, 1870, spoke of the insulted minister in these

terms:--

"'We are violating no confidence in saying that all the hopes of Mr.

Motley's official residence in England have been amply fulfilled,

and that the announcement of his unexpected and unexplained recall

was received with extreme astonishment and unfeigned regret. The

vacancy he leaves cannot possibly be filled by a minister more

sensitive to the honor of his government, more attentive to the

interests of his country, and more capable of uniting the most

vigorous performance of his public duties with the high-bred

courtesy and conciliatory tact and temper that make those duties

easy and successful. Mr. Motley's successor will find his mission

wonderfully facilitated by the firmness and discretion that have

presided over the conduct of American affairs in this country during

too brief a term, too suddenly and unaccountably concluded.'"

No man can escape being found fault with when it is necessary to make out

a case against him. A diplomatist is watched by the sharpest eyes and

commented on by the most merciless tongues. The best and wisest has his

defects, and sometimes they would seem to be very grave ones if brought

up against him in the form of accusation. Take these two portraits, for

instance, as drawn by John Quincy Adams. The first is that of Stratford

Canning, afterwards Lord Stratford de Redcliffe:--

"He is to depart to-morrow. I shall probably see him no more. He

is a proud, high-tempered Englishman, of good but not extraordinary

parts; stubborn and punctilious, with a disposition to be

overbearing, which I have often been compelled to check in its own

way. He is, of all the foreign ministers with whom I have had

occasion to treat, the man who has most severely tried my temper.

Yet he has been long in the diplomatic career, and treated with

governments of the most opposite characters. He has, however, a

great respect for his word, and there is nothing false about him.

This is an excellent quality for a negotiator. Mr. Canning is a man

of forms, studious of courtesy, and tenacious of private morals. As

a diplomatic man, his great want is suppleness, and his great virtue

is sincerity."

The second portrait is that of the French minister, Hyde de Neuville:--

"No foreign minister who ever resided here has been so universally

esteemed and beloved, nor have I ever been in political relations

with any foreign statesman of whose moral qualities I have formed so

good an opinion, with the exception of Count Romanzoff. He has not

sufficient command of his temper, is quick, irritable, sometimes

punctilious, occasionally indiscreet in his discourse, and tainted

with Royalist and Bourbon prejudices. But he has strong sentiments

of honor, justice, truth, and even liberty. His flurries of temper

pass off as quickly as they rise. He is neither profound nor

sublime nor brilliant; but a man of strong and good feelings, with

the experience of many vicissitudes of fortune, a good but common

understanding, and good intentions biassed by party feelings,

occasional interests, and personal affections."

It means very little to say that a man has some human imperfections, or

that a public servant might have done some things better. But when a

questionable cause is to be justified, the victim's excellences are

looked at with the eyes of Liliput and his failings with those of

Brobdingnag.

The recall of a foreign minister for alleged misconduct in office is a

kind of capital punishment. It is the nearest approach to the Sultan's

bowstring which is permitted to the chief magistrate of our Republic. A

general can do nothing under martial law more peremptory than a President

can do with regard to the public functionary whom he has appointed with

the advice and consent of the Senate, but whom he can officially degrade

and disgrace at his own pleasure for insufficient cause or for none at

all. Like the centurion of Scripture, he says Go, and he goeth. The

nation's representative is less secure in his tenure of office than his

own servant, to whom he must give warning of his impending dismissal.

"A breath unmakes him as a breath has made."

The chief magistrate's responsibility to duty, to the fellow-citizen at

his mercy, to his countrymen, to mankind, is in proportion to his power.

His prime minister, the agent of his edicts, should feel bound to

withstand him if he seeks to gratify a personal feeling under the plea of

public policy, unless the minister, like the slaves of the harem, is to

find his qualification for office in leaving his manhood behind him.

The two successive administrations, which treated Mr. Motley in a manner

unworthy of their position and cruel, if not fatal to him, have been

heard, directly or through their advocates. I have attempted to show that

the defence set up for their action is anything but satisfactory. A later

generation will sit in judgment upon the evidence more calmly than our

own. It is not for a friend, like the writer, to anticipate its decision,

but unless the reasons alleged to justify his treatment, and which have

so much the air of afterthoughts, shall seem stronger to that future

tribunal than they do to him, the verdict will be that Mr. Motley was

twice sacrificed to personal feelings which should never have been

cherished by the heads of the government, and should never have been

countenanced by their chief advisers.

JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.

A MEMOIR

By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Volume III.

XXII.

1874. AEt. 60.

"LIFE OF JOHN OF BARNEVELD."--CRITICISMS.--GROEN VAN PRINSTERER.

The full title of Mr. Motley's next and last work is "The Life and Death

of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland; with a View of the Primary

Causes and Movements of the Thirty Years' War."

In point of fact this work is a history rather than a biography. It is an

interlude, a pause between the acts which were to fill out the complete

plan of the "Eighty Years' Tragedy," and of which the last act, the

Thirty Years' War, remains unwritten. The "Life of Barneveld" was

received as a fitting and worthy continuation of the series of

intellectual labor in which he was engaged. I will quote but two general

expressions of approval from the two best known British critical reviews.

In connection with his previous works, it forms, says "The London

Quarterly," "a fine and continuous story, of which the writer and the

nation celebrated by him have equal reason to be proud; a narrative which

will remain a prominent ornament of American genius, while it has

permanently enriched English literature on this as well as on the other

side of the Atlantic."

"The Edinburgh Review" speaks no less warmly: "We can hardly give too

much appreciation to that subtile alchemy of the brain which has enabled

him to produce out of dull, crabbed, and often illegible state papers,

the vivid, graphic, and sparkling narrative which he has given to the

world."

In a literary point of view, M. Groen van Prinsterer, whose elaborate

work has been already referred to, speaks of it as perhaps the most

classical of Motley's productions, but it is upon this work that the

force of his own and other Dutch criticisms has been chiefly expended.

The key to this biographical history or historical biography may be found

in a few sentences from its opening chapter.

"There have been few men at any period whose lives have been more

closely identical than his [Barneveld's] with a national history.

There have been few great men in any history whose names have become

less familiar to the world, and lived less in the mouths of

posterity. Yet there can be no doubt that if William the Silent was

the founder of the independence of the United Provinces, Barneveld

was the founder of the Commonwealth itself. . . .

"Had that country of which he was so long the first citizen

maintained until our own day the same proportional position among

the empires of Christendom as it held in the seventeenth century,

the name of John of Barneveld would have perhaps been as familiar to

all men as it is at this moment to nearly every inhabitant of the

Netherlands. Even now political passion is almost as ready to flame

forth, either in ardent affection or enthusiastic hatred, as if two

centuries and a half had not elapsed since his death. His name is

so typical of a party, a polity, and a faith, so indelibly

associated with a great historical cataclysm, as to render it

difficult even for the grave, the conscientious, the learned, the

patriotic, of his own compatriots to speak of him with absolute

impartiality.

"A foreigner who loves and admires all that is great and noble in

the history of that famous republic, and can have no hereditary bias

as to its ecclesiastical or political theories, may at least attempt

the task with comparative coldness, although conscious of inability

to do thorough justice to a most complex subject."

With all Mr. Motley's efforts to be impartial, to which even his sternest

critics bear witness, he could not help becoming a partisan of the cause

which for him was that of religious liberty and progress, as against the

accepted formula of an old ecclesiastical organization. For the quarrel

which came near being a civil war, which convulsed the state, and cost

Barneveld his head, had its origin in a difference on certain points, and

more especially on a single point, of religious doctrine.

As a great river may be traced back until its fountainhead is found in a

thread of water streaming from a cleft in the rocks, so a great national

movement may sometimes be followed until its starting-point is found in

the cell of a monk or the studies of a pair of wrangling professors.

The religious quarrel of the Dutchmen in the seventeenth century reminds

us in some points of the strife between two parties in our own New

England, sometimes arraying the "church" on one side against the

"parish," or the general body of worshippers, on the other. The portraits

of Gomarus, the great orthodox champion, and Arminius, the head and front

of the "liberal theology" of his day, as given in the little old quarto

of Meursius, recall two ministerial types of countenance familiar to

those who remember the earlier years of our century.

Under the name of "Remonstrants" and "Contra-Remonstrants,"--Arminians

and old-fashioned Calvinists, as we should say,--the adherents of the two

Leyden professors disputed the right to the possession of the churches,

and the claim to be considered as representing the national religion. Of

the seven United Provinces, two, Holland and Utrecht, were prevailingly

Arminian, and the other five Calvinistic. Barneveld, who, under the title

of Advocate, represented the province of Holland, the most important of

them all, claimed for each province a right to determine its own state

religion. Maurice the Stadholder, son of William the Silent, the military

chief of the republic, claimed the right for the States-General. 'Cujus

regio ejus religio' was then the accepted public doctrine of Protestant

nations. Thus the provincial and the general governments were brought

into conflict by their creeds, and the question whether the republic was

a confederation or a nation, the same question which has been practically

raised, and for the time at least settled, in our own republic, was in

some way to be decided. After various disturbances and acts of violence

by both parties, Maurice, representing the States-General, pronounced for

the Calvinists or Contra-Remonstrants, and took possession of one of the

great churches, as an assertion of his authority. Barneveld, representing

the Arminian or Remonstrant provinces, levied a body of mercenary

soldiers in several of the cities. These were disbanded by Maurice, and

afterwards by an act of the States-General. Barneveld was apprehended,

imprisoned, and executed, after an examination which was in no proper

sense a trial. Grotius, who was on the Arminian side and involved in the

inculpated proceedings, was also arrested and imprisoned. His escape, by

a stratagem successfully repeated by a slave in our own times, may

challenge comparison for its romantic interest with any chapter of

fiction. How his wife packed him into the chest supposed to contain the

folios of the great oriental scholar Erpenius, how the soldiers wondered

at its weight and questioned whether it did not hold an Arminian, how the

servant-maid, Elsje van Houwening, quick-witted as Morgiana of the "Forty

Thieves," parried their questions and convoyed her master safely to the

friendly place of refuge,--all this must be read in the vivid narrative

of the author.

The questions involved were political, local, personal, and above all

religious. Here is the picture which Motley draws of the religious

quarrel as it divided the people:--

"In burghers' mansions, peasants' cottages, mechanics' back-parlors;

on board herring-smacks, canal-boats, and East Indiamen; in shops,

counting-rooms, farm-yards, guard-rooms, alehouses; on the exchange,

in the tennis court, on the mall; at banquets, at burials,

christenings, or bridals; wherever and whenever human creatures met

each other, there was ever to be found the fierce wrangle of

Remonstrant and Contra-Remonstrant, the hissing of red-hot

theological rhetoric, the pelting of hostile texts. The

blacksmith's iron cooled on the anvil, the tinker dropped a kettle

half mended, the broker left a bargain unclinched, the Scheveningen

fisherman in his wooden shoes forgot the cracks in his pinkie, while

each paused to hold high converse with friend or foe on fate, free-

will, or absolute foreknowledge; losing himself in wandering mazes

whence there was no issue. Province against province, city against

city, family against family; it was one vast scene of bickering,

denunciation, heart-burnings, mutual excommunication and hatred."

The religious grounds of the quarrel which set these seventeenth-century

Dutchmen to cutting each other's throats were to be looked for in the

"Five Points" of the Arminians as arrayed against the "Seven Points" of

the Gomarites, or Contra-Remonstrants. The most important of the

differences which were to be settled by fratricide seem to have been

these:--

According to the Five Points, "God has from eternity resolved to choose

to eternal life those who through his grace believe in Jesus Christ,"

etc. According to the Seven Points, "God in his election has not looked

at the belief and the repentance of the elect," etc. According to the

Five Points, all good deeds must be ascribed to God's grace in Christ,

but it does not work irresistibly. The language of the Seven Points

implies that the elect cannot resist God's eternal and unchangeable

design to give them faith and steadfastness, and that they can never

wholly and for always lose the true faith. The language of the Five

Points is unsettled as to the last proposition, but it was afterwards

maintained by the Remonstrant party that a true believer could, through

his own fault, fall away from God and lose faith.

It must be remembered that these religious questions had an immediate

connection with politics. Independently of the conflict of jurisdiction,

in which they involved the parties to the two different creeds, it was

believed or pretended that the new doctrines of the Remonstrants led

towards Romanism, and were allied with designs which threatened the

independence of the country. "There are two factions in the land," said

Maurice, "that of Orange and that of Spain, and the two chiefs of the

Spanish faction are those political and priestly Arminians, Uytenbogaert

and Oldenbarneveld."

The heads of the two religious and political parties were in such

hereditary, long-continued, and intimate relations up to the time when

one signed the other's death-warrant, that it was impossible to write the

life of one without also writing that of the other. For his biographer

John of Barneveld is the true patriot, the martyr, whose cause was that

of religious and political freedom. For him Maurice is the ambitious

soldier who hated his political rival, and never rested until this rival

was brought to the scaffold.

The questions which agitated men's minds two centuries and a half ago are

not dead yet in the country where they produced such estrangement,

violence, and wrong. No stranger could take them up without encountering

hostile criticism from one party or the other. It may be and has been

conceded that Mr. Motley writes as a partisan,--a partisan of freedom in

politics and religion, as he understands freedom. This secures him the

antagonism of one class of critics. But these critics are themselves

partisans, and themselves open to the cross-fire of their antagonists. M.

Groen van Prinsterer, "the learned and distinguished" editor of the

"Archives et Correspondance" of the Orange and Nassau family, published a

considerable volume, before referred to, in which many of Motley's views

are strongly controverted. But he himself is far from being in accord

with "that eminent scholar," M. Bakhuyzen van den Brink, whose name, he

says, is celebrated enough to need no comment, or with M. Fruin, of whose

impartiality and erudition he himself speaks in the strongest terms. The

ground upon which he is attacked is thus stated in his own words:--

"People have often pretended to find in my writings the deplorable

influence of an extreme Calvinism. The Puritans of the seventeenth

century are my fellow-religionists. I am a sectarian and not an

historian."

It is plain enough to any impartial reader that there are at least

plausible grounds for this accusation against Mr. Motley's critic. And on

a careful examination of the formidable volume, it becomes obvious that

Mr. Motley has presented a view of the events and the personages of the

stormy epoch with which he is dealing, which leaves a battle-ground yet

to be fought over by those who come after him. The dispute is not and

cannot be settled.

The end of all religious discussion has come when one of the parties

claims that it is thinking or acting under immediate Divine guidance. "It

is God's affair, and his honor is touched," says William Lewis to Prince

Maurice. Mr. Motley's critic is not less confident in claiming the

Almighty as on the side of his own views. Let him state his own ground of

departure:--

"To show the difference, let me rather say the contrast, between the

point of view of Mr. Motley and my own, between the Unitarian and

the Evangelical belief. I am issue of CALVIN, child of the

Awakening (reveil). Faithful to the device of the Reformers:

Justification by faith alone, and the Word of God endures eternally.

I consider history from the point of view of Merle d'Aubigne,

Chalmers, Guizot. I desire to be disciple and witness of our Lord

and Saviour, Jesus Christ."

He is therefore of necessity antagonistic to a writer whom he describes

in such words as these:--

"Mr. Motley is liberal and rationalist.

"He becomes, in attacking the principle of the Reformation, the

passionate opponent of the Puritans and of Maurice, the ardent

apologist of Barnevelt and the Arminians.

"It is understood, and he makes no mystery of it, that he inclines

towards the vague and undecided doctrine of the Unitarians."

What M. Groen's idea of Unitarians is may be gathered from the statement

about them which he gets from a letter of De Tocqueville.

"They are pure deists; they talk about the Bible, because they do

not wish to shock too severely public opinion, which is prevailingly

Christian. They have a service on Sundays; I have been there. At

it they read verses from Dryden or other English poets on the

existence of God and the immortality of the soul. They deliver a

discourse on some point of morality, and all is said."

In point of fact the wave of protest which stormed the dikes of Dutch

orthodoxy in the seventeenth century stole gently through the bars of New

England Puritanism in the eighteenth.

"Though the large number," says Mr. Bancroft, "still acknowledged the

fixedness of the divine decrees, and the resistless certainty from all

eternity of election and of reprobation, there were not wanting, even

among the clergy, some who had modified the sternness of the ancient

doctrine by making the self-direction of the active powers of man with

freedom of inquiry and private judgment the central idea of a protest

against Calvinism."

Protestantism, cut loose from an infallible church, and drifting with

currents it cannot resist, wakes up once or oftener in every century, to

find itself in a new locality. Then it rubs its eyes and wonders whether

it has found its harbor or only lost its anchor. There is no end to its

disputes, for it has nothing but a fallible vote as authority for its

oracles, and these appeal only to fallible interpreters.

It is as hard to contend in argument against "the oligarchy of heaven,"

as Motley calls the Calvinistic party, as it was formerly to strive with

them in arms.

To this "aristocracy of God's elect" belonged the party which framed the

declaration of the Synod of Dort; the party which under the forms of

justice shed the blood of the great statesman who had served his country

so long and so well. To this chosen body belonged the late venerable and

truly excellent as well as learned M. Groen van Prinsterer, and he

exercised the usual right of examining in the light of his privileged

position the views of a "liberal" and "rationalist" writer who goes to

meeting on Sunday to hear verses from Dryden. This does not diminish his

claim for a fair reading of the "intimate correspondence," which he

considers Mr. Motley has not duly taken into account, and of the other

letters to be found printed in his somewhat disjointed and fragmentary

volume.

This "intimate correspondence" shows Maurice the Stadholder indifferent

and lax in internal administration and as being constantly advised and

urged by his relative Count William of Nassau. This need of constant

urging extends to religious as well as other matters, and is inconsistent

with M. Groen van Prinsterer's assertion that the question was for

Maurice above all religious, and for Barneveld above all political.

Whether its negative evidence can be considered as neutralizing that

which is adduced by Mr. Motley to show the Stadholder's hatred of the

Advocate may be left to the reader who has just risen from the account of

the mock trial and the swift execution of the great and venerable

statesman. The formal entry on the record upon the day of his "judicial

murder" is singularly solemn and impressive:--

"Monday, 13th May, 1619. To-day was executed with the sword here in

the Hague, on a scaffold thereto erected in the Binnenhof before the

steps of the great hall, Mr. John of Barneveld, in his life Knight,

Lord of Berkel, Rodenrys, etc., Advocate of Holland and West

Friesland, for reasons expressed in the sentence and otherwise, with

confiscation of his property, after he had served the state thirty-

three years two months and five days, since 8th March, 1586; a man

of great activity, business, memory, and wisdom,--yea, extraordinary

in every respect. He that stands let him see that he does not

fall."

Maurice gave an account of the execution of Barneveld to Count William

Lewis on the same day in a note "painfully brief and dry."

Most authors write their own biography consciously or unconsciously. We

have seen Mr. Motley portraying much of himself, his course of life and

his future, as he would have had it, in his first story. In this, his

last work, it is impossible not to read much of his own external and

internal personal history told under other names and with different

accessories. The parallelism often accidentally or intentionally passes

into divergence. He would not have had it too close if he could, but

there are various passages in which it is plain enough that he is telling

his own story.

Mr. Motley was a diplomatist, and he writes of other diplomatists, and

one in particular, with most significant detail. It need not be supposed

that he intends the "arch intriguer" Aerssens to stand for himself, or

that he would have endured being thought to identify himself with the man

of whose "almost devilish acts" he speaks so freely. But the sagacious

reader--and he need not be very sharp-sighted--will very certainly see

something more than a mere historical significance in some of the

passages which I shall cite for him to reflect upon. Mr. Motley's

standard of an ambassador's accomplishments may be judged from the

following passage:--

"That those ministers [those of the Republic] were second to the

representatives of no other European state in capacity and

accomplishment was a fact well known to all who had dealings with

them, for the states required in their diplomatic representatives

knowledge of history and international law, modern languages, and

the classics, as well as familiarity with political customs and

social courtesies; the breeding of gentlemen, in short, and the

accomplishments of scholars."

The story of the troubles of Aerssens, the ambassador of the United

Provinces at Paris, must be given at some length, and will repay careful

reading.

"Francis Aerssens . . . continued to be the Dutch ambassador

after the murder of Henry IV. . . . He was beyond doubt one of

the ablest diplomatists in Europe. Versed in many languages, a

classical student, familiar with history and international law, a

man of the world and familiar with its usages, accustomed to

associate with dignity and tact on friendliest terms with

sovereigns, eminent statesmen, and men of letters; endowed with a

facile tongue, a fluent pen, and an eye and ear of singular

acuteness and delicacy; distinguished for unflagging industry and

singular aptitude for secret and intricate affairs;--he had by the

exercise of these various qualities during a period of nearly twenty

years at the court of Henry the Great been able to render

inestimable services to the Republic which he represented.

"He had enjoyed the intimacy and even the confidence of Henry IV.,

so far as any man could be said to possess that monarch's

confidence, and his friendly relations and familiar access to the

king gave him political advantages superior to those of any of his

colleagues at the same court.

"Acting entirely and faithfully according to the instructions of the

Advocate of Holland, he always gratefully and copiously acknowledged

the privilege of being guided and sustained in the difficult paths

he had to traverse by so powerful and active an intellect. I have

seldom alluded in terms to the instructions and dispatches of the

chief, but every position, negotiation, and opinion of the envoy

--and the reader has seen many of them is pervaded by their spirit.

"It had become a question whether he was to remain at his post or

return. It was doubtful whether he wished to be relieved of his

embassy or not. The States of Holland voted 'to leave it to his

candid opinion if in his free conscience he thinks he can serve the

public any longer. If yes, he may keep his office one year more.

If no, he may take leave and come home.'

"Surely the States, under the guidance of the Advocate, had thus

acted with consummate courtesy towards a diplomatist whose position,

from no apparent fault of his own, but by the force of

circumstances,--and rather to his credit than otherwise,

--was gravely compromised."

The Queen, Mary de' Medici, had a talk with him, got angry, "became very

red in the face," and wanted to be rid of him.

"Nor was the envoy at first desirous of remaining. . . .

Nevertheless, he yielded reluctantly to Barneveld's request that he

should, for the time at least, remain at his post. Later on, as the

intrigues against him began to unfold themselves, and his faithful

services were made use of at home to blacken his character and

procure his removal, he refused to resign, as to do so would be to

play into the hands of his enemies, and, by inference at least, to

accuse himself of infidelity to his trust. . . .

"It is no wonder that the ambassador was galled to the quick by the

outrage which those concerned in the government were seeking to put

upon him. How could an honest man fail to be overwhelmed with rage

and anguish at being dishonored before the world by his masters for

scrupulously doing his duty, and for maintaining the rights and

dignity of his own country? He knew that the charges were but

pretexts, that the motives of his enemies were as base as the

intrigues themselves, but he also knew that the world usually sides

with the government against the individual, and that a man's

reputation is rarely strong enough to maintain itself unsullied in a

foreign land when his own government stretches forth its hand, not

to shield, but to stab him. . . .

"'I know,' he said, that this plot has been woven partly here in

Holland and partly here by good correspondence in order to drive me

from my post.

"'But as I have discovered this accurately, I have resolved to offer

to my masters the continuance of my very humble service for such

time and under such conditions as they may think good to prescribe.

I prefer forcing my natural and private inclinations to giving an

opportunity for the ministers of this kingdom to discredit us, and

to my enemies to succeed in injuring me, and by fraud and malice to

force me from my post. . . . I am truly sorry, being ready to

retire, wishing to have an honorable testimony in recompense of my

labors, that one is in such hurry to take advantage of my fall. .

. . What envoy will ever dare to speak with vigor if he is not

sustained by the government at home? . . . My enemies have

misrepresented my actions, and my language as passionate,

exaggerated, mischievous, but I have no passion except for the

service of my superiors.'

"Barneveld, from well-considered motives of public policy, was

favoring his honorable recall. But he allowed a decorous interval

of more than three years to elapse in which to terminate his

affairs, and to take a deliberate departure from that French embassy

to which the Advocate had originally promoted him, and in which

there had been so many years of mutual benefit and confidence

between the two statesmen. He used no underhand means. He did not

abuse the power of the States-General which he wielded to cast him

suddenly and brutally from the distinguished post which he occupied,

and so to attempt to dishonor him before the world. Nothing could

be more respectful and conciliatory than the attitude of the

government from first to last towards this distinguished

functionary. The Republic respected itself too much to deal with

honorable agents whose services it felt obliged to dispense with as

with vulgar malefactors who had been detected in crime. . . .

"This work aims at being a political study. I would attempt to

exemplify the influence of individual humors and passions--some of

them among the highest, and others certainly the basest that agitate

humanity--upon the march of great events, upon general historical

results at certain epochs, and upon the destiny of eminent

personages."

Here are two suggestive portraits:--

"The Advocate, while acting only in the name of a slender

confederacy, was in truth, so long as he held his place, the prime

minister of European Protestantism. There was none other to rival

him, few to comprehend him, fewer still to sustain him. As Prince

Maurice was at that time the great soldier of Protestantism, without

clearly scanning the grandeur of the field in which he was a chief

actor, or foreseeing the vastness of its future, so the Advocate was

its statesman and its prophet. Could the two have worked together

as harmoniously as they had done at an earlier day, it would have

been a blessing for the common weal of Europe. But, alas! the evil

genius of jealousy, which so often forbids cordial relations between

soldier and statesman, already stood shrouded in the distance,

darkly menacing the strenuous patriot, who was wearing his life out

in exertions for what he deemed the true cause of progress and

humanity. . . .

"All history shows that the brilliant soldier of a republic is apt

to have the advantage, in a struggle for popular affection and

popular applause, over the statesman, however consummate. . . .

The great battles and sieges of the prince had been on a world's

theatre, had enchained the attention of Christendom, and on their

issue had frequently depended, or seemed to depend, the very

existence of the nation. The labors of the statesman, on the

contrary, had been comparatively secret. His noble orations and

arguments had been spoken with closed doors to assemblies of

colleagues, rather envoys than senators, . . while his vast labors

in directing both the internal administration and especially the

foreign affairs of the commonwealth had been by their very nature

as secret as they were perpetual and enormous."

The reader of the "Life of Barneveld" must judge for himself whether in

these and similar passages the historian was thinking solely of Maurice,

the great military leader, of Barneveld, the great statesman, and of

Aerssens, the recalled ambassador. He will certainly find that there were

"burning questions" for ministers to handle then as now, and recognize in

"that visible atmosphere of power the poison of which it is so difficult

to resist" a respiratory medium as well known to the nineteenth as to the

seventeenth century.

XXIII.

1874-1877. AEt. 60-63.

DEATH OF MRS. MOTLEY.--LAST VISIT TO AMERICA.--ILLNESS AND DEATH.-LADY

HARCOURT'S COMMUNICATION.

On the last day of 1874, the beloved wife, whose health had for some

years been failing, was taken from him by death. She had been the pride

of his happier years, the stay and solace of those which had so tried his

sensitive spirit. The blow found him already weakened by mental suffering

and bodily infirmity, and he never recovered from it. Mr. Motley's last

visit to America was in the summer and autumn of 1875. During several

weeks which he passed at Nahant, a seaside resort near Boston, I saw him

almost daily. He walked feebly and with some little difficulty, and

complained of a feeling of great weight in the right arm, which made

writing laborious. His handwriting had not betrayed any very obvious

change, so far as I had noticed in his letters. His features and speech

were without any paralytic character. His mind was clear except when, as

on one or two occasions, he complained of some confused feeling, and

walked a few minutes in the open air to compose himself. His thoughts

were always tending to revert to the almost worshipped companion from

whom death had parted him a few months before. Yet he could often be led

away to other topics, and in talking of them could be betrayed into

momentary cheerfulness of manner. His long-enduring and all-pervading

grief was not more a tribute to the virtues and graces of her whom he

mourned than an evidence of the deeply affectionate nature which in other

relations endeared him to so many whose friendship was a title to love

and honor.

I have now the privilege of once more recurring to the narrative of Mr.

Motley's daughter, Lady Harcourt.

"The harassing work and mental distress of this time [after the

recall from England], acting on an acutely nervous organization,

began the process of undermining his constitution, of which we were

so soon to see the results. It was not the least courageous act of

his life, that, smarting under a fresh wound, tired and unhappy, he

set his face immediately towards the accomplishment of fresh

literary labor. After my sister's marriage in January he went to

the Hague to begin his researches in the archives for John of

Barneveld. The Queen of the Netherlands had made ready a house

for us, and personally superintended every preparation for his

reception. We remained there until the spring, and then removed to

a house more immediately in the town, a charming old-fashioned

mansion, once lived in by John de Witt, where he had a large library

and every domestic comfort during the year of his sojourn. The

incessant literary labor in an enervating climate with enfeebled

health may have prepared the way for the first break in his

constitution, which was to show itself soon after. There were many

compensations in the life about him. He enjoyed the privilege of

constant companionship with one of the warmest hearts and finest

intellects which I have ever known in a woman,--the 'ame d'elite'

which has passed beyond this earth. The gracious sentiment with

which the Queen sought to express her sense of what Holland owed him

would have been deeply felt even had her personal friendship been

less dear to us all. From the King, the society of the Hague, and

the diplomatic circle we had many marks of kindness. Once or twice

I made short journeys with him for change of air to Amsterdam, to

look for the portraits of John of Barneveld and his wife; to

Bohemia, where, with the lingering hope of occupying himself with

the Thirty Years' War, he looked carefully at the scene of

Wallenstein's death near Prague, and later to Varzin in Pomerania

for a week with Prince Bismarck, after the great events of the

Franco-German war. In the autumn of 1872 we moved to England,

partly because it was evident that his health and my mother's

required a change; partly for private reasons to be near my sister

and her children. The day after our arrival at Bournemouth occurred

the rupture of a vessel on the lungs, without any apparently

sufficient cause. He recovered enough to revise and complete his

manuscript, and we thought him better, when at the end of July, in

London, he was struck down by the first attack of the head, which

robbed him of all after power of work, although the intellect

remained untouched. Sir William Gull sent him to Cannes for the

winter, where he was seized with a violent internal inflammation,

in which I suppose there was again the indication of the lesion of

blood-vessels. I am nearing the shadow now,--the time of which I

can hardly bear to write. You know the terrible sorrow which

crushed him on the last day of 1874,--the grief which broke his

heart and from which he never rallied. From that day it seems to me

that his life may be summed up in the two words,--patient waiting.

Never for one hour did her spirit leave him, and he strove to follow

its leading for the short and evil days left and the hope of the

life beyond. I think I have never watched quietly and reverently

the traces of one personal character remaining so strongly impressed

on another nature. With herself--depreciation and unselfishness she

would have been the last to believe how much of him was in her very

existence; nor could we have realized it until the parting came.

Henceforward, with the mind still there, but with the machinery

necessary to set it in motion disturbed and shattered, he could but

try to create small occupations with which to fill the hours of a

life which was only valued for his children's sake. Kind and loving

friends in England and America soothed the passage, and our

gratitude for so many gracious acts is deep and true. His love for

children, always a strong feeling, was gratified by the constant

presence of my sister's babies, the eldest, a little girl who bore

my mother's name, and had been her idol, being the companion of many

hours and his best comforter. At the end the blow came swiftly and

suddenly, as he would have wished it. It was a terrible shock to us

who had vainly hoped to keep him a few years longer, but at least he

was spared what he had dreaded with a great dread, a gradual failure

of mental or bodily power. The mind was never clouded, the

affections never weakened, and after a few hours of unconscious

physical struggle he lay at rest, his face beautiful and calm,

without a trace of suffering or illness. Once or twice he said, 'It

has come, it has come,' and there were a few broken words before

consciousness fled, but there was little time for messages or leave-

taking. By a strange coincidence his life ended near the town of

Dorchester, in the mother country, as if the last hour brought with

it a reminiscence of his birthplace, and of his own dearly loved

mother. By his own wish only the dates of his birth and death

appear upon his gravestone, with the text chosen by himself, 'In God

is light, and in him is no darkness at all.'"

XXIV.

CONCLUSION.--HIS CHARACTER.--HIS LABORS.--HIS REWARD.

In closing this restricted and imperfect record of a life which merits,

and in due time will, I trust, receive an ampler tribute, I cannot

refrain from adding a few thoughts which naturally suggest themselves,

and some of which may seem quite unnecessary to the reader who has

followed the story of the historian and diplomatist's brilliant and

eventful career.

Mr. Motley came of a parentage which promised the gifts of mind and body

very generally to be accounted for, in a measure at least, wherever we

find them, by the blood of one or both of the parents. They gave him

special attractions and laid him open to not a few temptations. Too many

young men born to shine in social life, to sparkle, it may be, in

conversation, perhaps in the lighter walks of literature, become

agreeable idlers, self-indulgent, frivolous, incapable of large designs

or sustained effort, lose every aspiration and forget every ideal. Our

gilded youth want such examples as this of Motley, not a solitary, but a

conspicuous one, to teach them how much better is the restlessness of a

noble ambition than the narcotized stupor of club-life or the vapid

amusement of a dressed-up intercourse which too often requires a

questionable flavor of forbidden license to render it endurable to

persons of vivacious character and temperament.

It would seem difficult for a man so flattered from his earliest days to

be modest in his self-estimate; but Motley was never satisfied with

himself. He was impulsive, and was occasionally, I have heard it said,

over excited, when his prejudices were roughly handled. In all that

related to the questions involved in our civil war, he was, no doubt,

very sensitive. He had heard so much that exasperated him in the foreign

society which he had expected to be in full sympathy with the cause of

liberty as against slavery, that he might be excused if he showed

impatience when he met with similar sentiments among his own countrymen.

He felt that he had been cruelly treated by his own government, and no

one who conceives himself to have been wronged and insulted must be

expected to reason in naked syllogisms on the propriety of the liberties

which have been taken with his name and standing. But with all his

quickness of feeling, his manners were easy and courteous, simply because

his nature was warm and kindly, and with all his natural fastidiousness

there was nothing of the coxcomb about him.

He must have had enemies, as all men of striking individuality are sure

to have; his presence cast more uncouth patriots into the shade; his

learning was a reproach to the ignorant, his fame was too bright a

distinction; his high-bred air and refinement, which he could not help,

would hardly commend him to the average citizen in an order of things in

which mediocrity is at a premium, and the natural nobility of presence,

which rarely comes without family antecedents to account for it, is not

always agreeable to the many whose two ideals are the man on horseback

and the man in his shirt-sleeves. It may well be questioned whether

Washington, with his grand manner, would be nearly as popular with what

are called "the masses" as Lincoln, with his homely ways and broad

stories. The experiment of universal suffrage must render the waters of

political and social life more or less turbid even if they remain

innoxious. The Cloaca Maxima can hardly mingle its contents with the

stream of the Aqua Claudia, without taking something from its crystal

clearness. We need not go so far as one of our well-known politicians has

recently gone in saying that no great man can reach the highest position

in our government, but we can safely say that, apart from military fame,

the loftiest and purest and finest personal qualities are not those which

can be most depended upon at the ballot-box. Strange stories are told of

avowed opposition to Mr. Motley on the ground of the most trivial

differences in point of taste in personal matters,--so told that it is

hard to disbelieve them, and they show that the caprices which we might

have thought belonged exclusively to absolute rulers among their

mistresses or their minions may be felt in the councils of a great people

which calls itself self-governing. It is perfectly true that Mr. Motley

did not illustrate the popular type of politician. He was too

high-minded, too scholarly, too generously industrious, too polished, too

much at home in the highest European circles, too much courted for his

personal fascinations, too remote from the trading world of caucus

managers. To degrade him, so far as official capital punishment could do

it, was not merely to wrong one whom the nation should have delighted to

honor as showing it to the world in the fairest flower of its young

civilization, but it was an indignity to a representative of the highest

scholarship of native growth, which every student in the land felt as a

discouragement to all sound learning and noble ambition.

If he was disappointed in his diplomatic career, he had enough, and more

than enough, to console him in his brilliant literary triumphs. He had

earned them all by the most faithful and patient labor. If he had not the

"frame of adamant" of the Swedish hero, he had his "soul of fire." No

labors could tire him, no difficulties affright him. What most surprised

those who knew him as a young man was, not his ambition, not his

brilliancy, but his dogged, continuous capacity for work. We have seen

with what astonishment the old Dutch scholar, Groen van Prinsterer,

looked upon a man who had wrestled with authors like Bor and Van Meteren,

who had grappled with the mightiest folios and toiled undiscouraged among

half-illegible manuscript records. Having spared no pains in collecting

his materials, he told his story, as we all know, with flowing ease and

stirring vitality. His views may have been more or less partial; Philip

the Second may have deserved the pitying benevolence of poor Maximilian;

Maurice may have wept as sincerely over the errors of Arminius as any one

of "the crocodile crew that believe in election;" Barneveld and Grotius

may have been on the road to Rome; none of these things seem probable,

but if they were all proved true in opposition to his views, we should

still have the long roll of glowing tapestry he has woven for us, with

all its life-like portraits, its almost moving pageants, its sieges where

we can see the artillery flashing, its battle-fields with their smoke and

fire,--pictures which cannot fade, and which will preserve his name

interwoven with their own enduring colors.

Republics are said to be ungrateful; it might be truer to say that they

are forgetful. They forgive those who have wronged them as easily as they

forget those who have done them good service. But History never forgets

and never forgives. To her decision we may trust the question, whether

the warm-hearted patriot who had stood up for his country nobly and

manfully in the hour of trial, the great scholar and writer who had

reflected honor upon her throughout the world of letters, the high-minded

public servant, whose shortcomings it taxed the ingenuity of experts to

make conspicuous enough to be presentable, was treated as such a citizen

should have been dealt with. His record is safe in her hands, and his

memory will be precious always in the hearts of all who enjoyed his

friendship.

APPENDIX.

A.

THE SATURDAY CLUB.

This club, of which we were both members, and which is still flourishing,

came into existence in a very quiet sort of way at about the same time as

"The Atlantic Monthly," and, although entirely unconnected with that

magazine, included as members some of its chief contributors. Of those

who might have been met at some of the monthly gatherings in its earlier

days I may mention Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Motley,

Whipple, Whittier; Professors Agassiz and Peirce; John S. Dwight;

Governor Andrew, Richard H. Dana, Junior, Charles Sumner. It offered a

wide gamut of intelligences, and the meetings were noteworthy occasions.

If there was not a certain amount of "mutual admiration" among some of

those I have mentioned it was a great pity, and implied a defect in the

nature of men who were otherwise largely endowed. The vitality of this

club has depended in a great measure on its utter poverty in statutes and

by-laws, its entire absence of formality, and its blessed freedom from

speech-making.

That holy man, Richard Baxter, says in his Preface to Alleine's

"Alarm:"--

"I have done, when I have sought to remove a little scandal, which I

foresaw, that I should myself write the Preface to his Life where

himself and two of his friends make such a mention of my name, which

I cannot own; which will seem a praising him for praising me. I

confess it looketh ill-favoredly in me. But I had not the power of

other men's writings, and durst not forbear that which was his due."

I do not know that I have any occasion for a similar apology in printing

the following lines read at a meeting of members of the Saturday Club and

other friends who came together to bid farewell to Motley before his

return to Europe in 1857.

A PARTING HEALTH

Yes, we knew we must lose him,--though friendship may claim

To blend her green leaves with the laurels of fame,

Though fondly, at parting, we call him our own,

'T is the whisper of love when the bugle has blown.

As the rider that rests with the spur on his heel,

As the guardsman that sleeps in his corselet of steel,

As the archer that stands with his shaft on the string,

He stoops from his toil to the garland we bring.

What pictures yet slumber unborn in his loom

Till their warriors shall breathe and their beauties shall bloom,

While the tapestry lengthens the life-glowing dyes

That caught from our sunsets the stain of their skies!

In the alcoves of death, in the charnels of time,

Where flit the dark spectres of passion and crime,

There are triumphs untold, there are martyrs unsung,

There are heroes yet silent to speak with his tongue!

Let us hear the proud story that time has bequeathed

From lips that are warm with the freedom they breathed!

Let him summon its tyrants, and tell us their doom,

Though he sweep the black past like Van Tromp with his broom!

The dream flashes by, for the west-winds awake

On pampas, on prairie, o'er mountain and lake,

To bathe the swift bark, like a sea-girdled shrine

With incense they stole from the rose and the pine.

So fill a bright cup with the sunlight that gushed

When the dead summer's jewels were trampled and crushed;

THE TRUE KNIGHT OF LEARNING,--the world holds him dear,--

Love bless him, joy crown him, God speed his career!

B.

HABITS AND METHODS OF STUDY.

Mr. Motley's daughter, Lady Harcourt, has favored me with many

interesting particulars which I could not have learned except from a

member of his own family. Her description of his way of living and of

working will be best given in her own words:--

"He generally rose early, the hour varying somewhat at different

parts of his life, according to his work and health. Sometimes when

much absorbed by literary labor he would rise before seven, often

lighting his own fire, and with a cup of tea or coffee writing until

the family breakfast hour, after which his work was immediately

resumed, and he usually sat over his writing-table until late in the

afternoon, when he would take a short walk. His dinner hour was

late, and he rarely worked at night. During the early years of his

literary studies he led a life of great retirement. Later, after

the publication of the 'Dutch Republic' and during the years of

official place, he was much in society in England, Austria, and

Holland. He enjoyed social life, and particularly dining out,

keenly, but was very moderate and simple in all his personal habits,

and for many years before his death had entirely given up smoking.

His work, when not in his own library, was in the Archives of the

Netherlands, Brussels, Paris, the English State Paper Office, and

the British Museum, where he made his own researches, patiently and

laboriously consulting original manuscripts and reading masses of

correspondence, from which he afterwards sometimes caused copies to

be made, and where he worked for many consecutive hours a day.

After his material had been thus painfully and toilfully amassed,

the writing of his own story was always done at home, and his mind,

having digested the necessary matter, always poured itself forth in

writing so copiously that his revision was chiefly devoted to

reducing the over-abundance. He never shrank from any of the

drudgery of preparation, but I think his own part of the work was

sheer pleasure to him."

I should have mentioned that his residence in London while minister was

at the house No. 17 Arlington Street, belonging to Lord Yarborough.

C.

SIR WILLIAM GULL's ACCOUNT OF HIS ILLNESS.

I have availed myself of the permission implied in the subjoined letter

of Sir William Gull to make large extracts from his account of Mr.

Motley's condition while under his medical care. In his earlier years he

had often complained to me of those "nervous feelings connected with the

respiration" referred to by this very distinguished physician. I do not

remember any other habitual trouble to which he was subject.

74 BROOK STREET, GROSVENOR SQUARE, W.

February 13, 1878.

MY DEAR SIR,--I send the notes of Mr. Motley's last illness, as I

promised. They are too technical for general readers, but you will make

such exception as you require. The medical details may interest your

professional friends. Mr. Motley's case was a striking illustration that

the renal disease of so-called Bright's disease may supervene as part and

parcel of a larger and antecedent change in the blood-vessels in other

parts than the kidney. . . . I am, my dear sir,

Yours very truly,

WILLIAM W. GULL.

To OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, ESQ.

I first saw Mr. Motley, I believe, about the year 1870, on account

of some nervous feelings connected with the respiration. At that

time his general health was good, and all he complained of was

occasionally a feeling of oppression about the chest. There were no

physical signs of anything abnormal, and the symptoms quite passed

away in the course of time, and with the use of simple antispasmodic

remedies, such as camphor and the like. This was my first interview

with Mr. Motley, and I was naturally glad to have the opportunity of

making his acquaintance. I remember that in our conversation I

jokingly said that my wife could hardly forgive him for not making

her hero, Henri IV., a perfect character, and the earnestness with

which he replied 'au serieux,' I assure you I have fairly recorded

the facts. After this date I did not see Mr. Motley for some time.

He had three slight attacks of haemoptysis in the autumn of 1872,

but no physical signs of change in the lung tissue resulted. So

early as this I noticed that there were signs of commencing

thickening in the heart, as shown by the degree and extent of its

impulse. The condition of his health, though at that time not very

obviously failing, a good deal arrested my attention, as I thought I

could perceive in the occurrence of the haemoptysis, and in the

cardiac hypertrophy, the early beginnings of vascular degeneration.

In August, 1873, occurred the remarkable seizure, from the effects

of which Mr. Motley never recovered. I did not see him in the

attack, but was informed, as far as I can remember, that he was on a

casual visit at a friend's house at luncheon (or it might have been

dinner), when he suddenly became strangely excited, but not quite

unconscious. . . . I believed at the time, and do so still, that

there was some capillary apoplexy of the convolutions. The attack

was attended with some hemiplegic weakness on the right side, and

altered sensation, and ever after there was a want of freedom and

ease both in the gait and in the use of the arm of that side. To my

inquiries from time to time how the arm was, the patient would

always flex and extend it freely, but nearly always used the

expression, "There is a bedevilment in it;" though the handwriting

was not much, if at all, altered.

In December, 1873, Mr. Motley went by my advice to Cannes. I wrote

the following letter at the time to my friend Dr. Frank, who was

practising there:--

[This letter, every word of which was of value to the

practitioner who was to have charge of the patient, relates

many of the facts given above, and I shall therefore only give

extracts from it.]

December 29, 1873.

MY DEAR DR. FRANK,--My friend Mr. Motley, the historian and late

American Minister, whose name and fame no doubt you know very well,

has by my advice come to Cannes for the winter and spring, and I

have promised him to give you some account of his case. To me it is

one of special interest, and personally, as respects the subject of

it, of painful interest. I have known Mr. Motley for some time, but

he consulted me for the present condition about midsummer.

. . . If I have formed a correct opinion of the pathology of the

case, I believe the smaller vessels are degenerating in several

parts of the vascular area, lung, brain, and kidneys. With this

view I have suggested a change of climate, a nourishing diet, etc.;

and it is to be hoped, and I trust expected, that by great attention

to the conditions of hygiene, internal and external, the progress of

degeneration may be retarded. I have no doubt you will find, as

time goes on, increasing evidence of renal change, but this is

rather a coincidence and consequence than a cause, though no doubt

when the renal change has reached a certain point, it becomes in its

own way a factor of other lesions. I have troubled you at this

length because my mind is much occupied with the pathology of these

cases, and because no case can, on personal grounds, more strongly

challenge our attention.

Yours very truly,

WILLIAM W. GULL.

During the spring of 1874, whilst at Cannes, Mr. Motley had a sharp

attack of nephritis, attended with fever; but on returning to

England in July there was no important change in the health. The

weakness of the side continued, and the inability to undertake any

mental work. The signs of cardiac hypertrophy were more distinct.

In the beginning of the year 1875 I wrote as follows:--

February 20, 1875.

MY DEAR Mr. MOTLEY,--. . . The examination I have just made

appears to indicate that the main conditions of your health are more

stable than they were some months ago, and would therefore be so far

in favor of your going to America in the summer, as we talked of.

The ground of my doubt has lain in the possibility of such a trip

further disordering the circulation. Of this, I hope, there is now

less risk.

On the 4th of June, 1875, I received the following letter:--

CALVERLY PARK HOTEL, TUNBRIDGE WELLS,

June 4, 1875.

MY DEAR SIR WILLIAM,--I have been absent from town for a long time,

but am to be there on the 9th and 10th. Could I make an appointment

with you for either of those days? I am anxious to have a full

consultation with you before leaving for America. Our departure is

fixed for the 19th of this month. I have not been worse than usual

of late. I think myself, on the contrary, rather stronger, and it

is almost impossible for me not to make my visit to America this

summer, unless you should absolutely prohibit it. If neither of

those days should suit you, could you kindly suggest another day?

I hope, however, you can spare me half an hour on one of those days,

as I like to get as much of this bracing air as I can. Will you

kindly name the hour when I may call on you, and address me at this

hotel. Excuse this slovenly note in pencil, but it fatigues my head

and arm much more to sit at a writing-table with pen and ink.

Always most sincerely yours,

My dear Sir William,

J. L. MOTLEY.

On Mr. Motley's return from America I saw him, and found him, I

thought, rather better in general health than when he left England.

In December, 1875, Mr. Motley consulted me for trouble of vision in

reading or walking, from sensations like those produced by flakes of

falling snow coming between him and the objects he was looking at.

Mr. Bowman, one of our most excellent oculists, was then consulted.

Mr. Bowman wrote to me as follows: "Such symptoms as exist point

rather to disturbed retinal function than to any brain-mischief. It

is, however, quite likely that what you fear for the brain may have

had its counterpart in the nerve-structures of the eye, and as he is

short-sighted, this tendency may be further intensified."

Mr. Bowman suggested no more than such an arrangement of glasses as

might put the eyes, when in use, under better optic conditions.

The year 1876 was passed over without any special change worth

notice. The walking powers were much impeded by the want of control

over the right leg. The mind was entirely clear, though Mr. Motley

did not feel equal, and indeed had been advised not to apply

himself, to any literary work. Occasional conversations, when I had

interviews with him on the subject of his health, proved that the

attack which had weakened the movements of the right side had not

impaired the mental power. The most noticeable change which had

come over Mr. Motley since I first knew him was due to the death of

Mrs. Motley in December, 1874. It had in fact not only profoundly

depressed him, but, if I may so express it, had removed the centre

of his thought to a new world. In long conversations with me of a

speculative kind, after that painful event, it was plain how much

his point of view of the whole course and relation of things had

changed. His mind was the last to dogmatize on any subject. There

was a candid and childlike desire to know, with an equal confession

of the incapacity of the human intellect. I wish I could recall the

actual expressions he used, but the sense was that which has been so

well stated by Hooker in concluding an exhortation against the pride

of the human intellect, where he remarks:--

"Dangerous it were for the feeble brain of man to wade far into the

doings of the Most High; whom although to know be life, and joy to

make mention of His Name, yet our soundest knowledge is to know that

we know Him, not indeed as He is, neither can know Him; and our

safest eloquence concerning Him is our silence, when we confess

without confession that His glory is inexplicable, His greatness

above our capacity and reach. He is above and we upon earth;

therefore it behoveth our words to be wary and few."

Mrs. Motley's illness was not a long one, and the nature of it was

such that its course could with certainty be predicted. Mr. Motley

and her children passed the remaining days of her life, extending

over about a month, with her, in the mutual under standing that she

was soon to part from them. The character of the illness, and the

natural exhaustion of her strength by suffering, lessened the shock

of her death, though not the loss, to those who survived her.

The last time I saw Mr. Motley was, I believe, about two months

before his death, March 28, 1877. There was no great change in his

health, but he complained of indescribable sensations in his nervous

system, and felt as if losing the whole power of walking, but this

was not obvious in his gait, although he walked shorter distances

than before. I heard no more of him until I was suddenly summoned

on the 29th of May into Devonshire to see him. The telegram I

received was so urgent, that I suspected some rupture of a blood-

vessel in the brain, and that I should hardly reach him alive; and

this was the case. About two o'clock in the day he complained of a

feeling of faintness, said he felt ill and should not recover; and

in a few minutes was insensible with symptoms of ingravescent

apoplexy. There was extensive haemorrhage into the brain, as shown

by post-mortem examination, the cerebral vessels being atheromatous.

The fatal haemorrhage had occurred into the lateral ventricles, from

rupture of one of the middle cerebral arteries.

I am, my dear Sir,

Yours very truly,

WILLIAM W. GULL.

E.

FROM THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS SOCIETY.

At a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society, held on Thursday,

the 14th of June, 1877, after the reading of the records of the preceding

meeting, the president, the Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, spoke as follows:

"Our first thoughts to-day, gentlemen, are of those whom we may not

again welcome to these halls. We shall be in no mood, certainly,

for entering on other subjects this morning until we have given some

expression to our deep sense of the loss--the double loss--which our

Society has sustained since our last monthly meeting."--[Edmund

Quincy died May 17. John Lothrop Motley died May 29.]

After a most interesting and cordial tribute to his friend, Mr. Quincy,

Mr. Winthrop continued:

"The death of our distinguished associate, Motley, can hardly have

taken many of us by surprise. Sudden at the moment of its

occurrence, we had long been more or less prepared for it by his

failing health. It must, indeed, have been quite too evident to

those who had seen him, during the last two or three years, that his

life-work was finished. I think he so regarded it himself.

"Hopes may have been occasionally revived in the hearts of his

friends, and even in his own heart, that his long-cherished purpose

of completing a History of the Thirty Years' War, as the grand

consummation of his historical labors,--for which all his other

volumes seemed to him to have been but the preludes and overtures,

--might still be accomplished. But such hopes, faint and flickering

from his first attack, had well-nigh died away. They were like

Prescott's hopes of completing his 'Philip the Second,' or like

Macaulay's hopes of finishing his brilliant 'History of England.'

"But great as may be the loss to literature of such a crowning work

from Motley's pen, it was by no means necessary to the completeness

of his own fame. His 'Rise of the Dutch Republic,' his 'History of

the United Netherlands,' and his 'Life of John of Barneveld,' had

abundantly established his reputation, and given him a fixed place

among the most eminent historians of our country and of our age.

"No American writer, certainly, has secured a wider recognition or a

higher appreciation from the scholars of the Old World. The

universities of England and the learned societies of Europe have

bestowed upon him their largest honors. It happened to me to be in

Paris when he was first chosen a corresponding member of the

Institute, and when his claims were canvassed with the freedom and

earnestness which peculiarly characterize such a candidacy in

France. There was no mistaking the profound impression which his

first work had made on the minds of such men as Guizot and Mignet.

Within a year or two past, a still higher honor has been awarded him

from the same source. The journals not long ago announced his

election as one of the six foreign associates of the French Academy

of Moral and Political Sciences,--a distinction which Prescott would

probably have attained had he lived a few years longer, until there

was a vacancy, but which, as a matter of fact, I believe, Motley was

the only American writer, except the late Edward Livingston, of

Louisiana, who has actually enjoyed.

"Residing much abroad, for the purpose of pursuing his historical

researches, he had become the associate and friend of the most

eminent literary men in almost all parts of the world, and the

singular charms of his conversation and manners had made him a

favorite guest in the most refined and exalted circles.

"Of his relations to political and public life, this is hardly the

occasion or the moment for speaking in detail. Misconstructions and

injustices are the proverbial lot of those who occupy eminent

position. It was a duke of Vienna, if I remember rightly, whom

Shakespeare, in his 'Measure for Measure,' introduces as

exclaiming,--

'O place and greatness, millions of false eyes

Are stuck upon thee! Volumes of report

Run with these false and most contrarious quests

Upon thy doings! Thousand 'stapes of wit

Make thee the father of their idle dream,

And rack thee in their fancies!'

"I forbear from all application of the lines. It is enough for me,

certainly, to say here, to-day, that our country was proud to be

represented at the courts of Vienna and London successively by a

gentleman of so much culture and accomplishment as Mr. Motley, and

that the circumstances of his recall were deeply regretted by us

all.

"His fame, however, was quite beyond the reach of any such

accidents, and could neither be enhanced nor impaired by

appointments or removals. As a powerful and brilliant historian we

pay him our unanimous tribute of admiration and regret, and give him

a place in our memories by the side of Prescott and Irving. I do

not forget how many of us lament him, also, as a cherished friend.

"He died on the 29th ultimo, at the house of his daughter, Mrs.

Sheridan, in Dorsetshire, England, and an impressive tribute to his

memory was paid, in Westminster Abbey, on the following Sunday, by

our Honorary Member, Dean Stanley. Such a tribute, from such lips,

and with such surroundings, leaves nothing to be desired in the way

of eulogy. He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, by the side of

his beloved wife.

"One might well say of Motley precisely what he said of Prescott, in

a letter from Rome to our associate, Mr. William Amory, immediately

on hearing of Prescott's death: 'I feel inexpressibly disappointed

--speaking now for an instant purely from a literary point of view

--that the noble and crowning monument of his life, for which he had

laid such massive foundations, and the structure of which had been

carried forward in such a grand and masterly manner, must remain

uncompleted, like the unfinished peristyle of some stately and

beautiful temple on which the night of time has suddenly descended.

But, still, the works which his great and untiring hand had already

thoroughly finished will remain to attest his learning and genius,

--a precious and perpetual possession for his country."

.................................

The President now called on Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said:--

"The thoughts which suggest themselves upon this occasion are such

as belong to the personal memories of the dear friends whom we have

lost, rather than to their literary labors, the just tribute to

which must wait for a calmer hour than the present, following so

closely as it does on our bereavement."

.................................

"His first literary venture of any note was the story called

'Morton's Hope; or, The Memoirs of a Provincial.' This first effort

failed to satisfy the critics, the public, or himself. His

personality pervaded the characters and times which he portrayed,

so that there was a discord between the actor and his costume.

Brilliant passages could not save it; and it was plain enough that

he must ripen into something better before the world would give him

the reception which surely awaited him if he should find his true

destination.

"The early failures of a great writer are like the first sketches

of a great artist, and well reward patient study. More than this,

the first efforts of poets and story-tellers are very commonly

palimpsests: beneath the rhymes or the fiction one can almost always

spell out the characters which betray the writer's self. Take these

passages from the story just referred to:

"'Ah! flattery is a sweet and intoxicating potion, whether we drink

it from an earthen ewer or a golden chalice. . . . Flattery from

man to woman is expected: it is a part of the courtesy of society;

but when the divinity descends from the altar to burn incense to the

priest, what wonder if the idolater should feel himself transformed

into a god!'

"He had run the risk of being spoiled, but he had a safeguard in his

aspirations.

"'My ambitious anticipations,' says Morton, in the story, 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.'

"Who can doubt that in this passage of his story he is picturing his

own visions, one of the fairest of which was destined to become

reality?

"But there was another element in his character, which those who

knew him best recognized as one with which he had to struggle hard,

--that is, a modesty which sometimes tended to collapse into self-

distrust. This, too, betrays itself in the sentences which follow

those just quoted:--

"'In short,' says Morton, 'I was already enrolled in that large

category of what are called young men of genius, . . . men of

whom unheard-of things are expected; till after long preparation

comes a portentous failure, and then they are forgotten. . . .

Alas! for the golden imaginations of our youth. . . . They are

all disappointments. They are bright and beautiful, but they fade.'"

...........................

The President appointed Professor Lowell to write the Memoir of Mr.

Quincy, and Dr. Holmes that of Mr. Motley, for the Society's

"Proceedings."

Professor William Everett then spoke as follows:

"There is one incident, sir, in Mr. Motley's career that has not

been mentioned to-day, which is, perhaps, most vividly remembered by

those of us who were in Europe at the outbreak of our civil war in

1861. At that time, the ignorance of Englishmen, friendly or

otherwise, about America, was infinite: they knew very little of us,

and that little wrong. Americans were overwhelmed with questions,

taunts, threats, misrepresentations, the outgrowth of ignorance, and

ignoring worse than ignorance, from every class of Englishmen.

Never was an authoritative exposition of our hopes and policy worse

needed; and there was no one to do it. The outgoing diplomatic

agents represented a bygone order of things; the representatives of

Mr. Lincoln's administration had not come. At that time of anxiety,

Mr. Motley, living in England as a private person, came forward with

two letters in the 'Times,' which set forth the cause of the United

States once and for all. No unofficial, and few official, men could

have spoken with such authority, and been so certain of obtaining a

hearing from Englishmen. Thereafter, amid all the clouds of

falsehood and ridicule which we had to encounter, there was one

lighthouse fixed on a rock to which we could go for foothold, from

which we could not be driven, and against which all assaults were

impotent.

"There can be no question that the effect produced by these letters

helped, if help had been needed, to point out Mr. Motley as a

candidate for high diplomatic place who could not be overlooked.

Their value was recognized alike by his fellow-citizens in America

and his admirers in England; but none valued them more than the

little band of exiles, who were struggling against terrible odds,

and who rejoiced with a great joy to see the stars and stripes,

whose centennial anniversary those guns are now celebrating, planted

by a hand so truly worthy to rally every American to its support."

G.

POEM BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

I cannot close this Memoir more appropriately than by appending the

following poetical tribute:--

IN MEMORY OF JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.

BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

Sleep, Motley, with the great of ancient days,

Who wrote for all the years that yet shall be.

Sleep with Herodotus, whose name and praise

Have reached the isles of earth's remotest sea.

Sleep, while, defiant of the slow delays

Of Time, thy glorious writings speak for thee

And in the answering heart of millions raise

The generous zeal for Right and Liberty.

And should the days o'ertake us, when, at last,

The silence that--ere yet a human pen

Had traced the slenderest record of the past

Hushed the primeval languages of men

Upon our English tongue its spell shall cast,

Thy memory shall perish only then.

American Men of Letters

EDITED BY

CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.

"_Thou wert the morning star among the living,

Ere thy fair light had fled:

Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving

New splendor to the dead._"

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

BY

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

1891

NOTE.

My thanks are due to the members of Mr. Emerson's family, and the other

friends who kindly assisted me by lending interesting letters and

furnishing valuable information.

The Index, carefully made by Mr. J.H. Wiggin, was revised and somewhat

abridged by myself.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

BOSTON, November 25, 1884.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I.

1803-1823. To AET. 20.

Birthplace.--Boyhood.--College Life.

CHAPTER II.

1823-1828. AET. 20-25.

Extract from a Letter to a Classmate.--School-Teaching.--Study of

Divinity.--"Approbated" to Preach.--Visit to the South.--Preaching in

Various Places.

CHAPTER III.

1828-1833. AET. 25-30.

Settled as Colleague of Rev. Henry Ware.--Married to Ellen Louisa

Tucker.--Sermon at the Ordination of Rev. H.B. Goodwin.--His Pastoral

and Other Labors.--Emerson and Father Taylor.--Death of Mrs.

Emerson.--Difference of Opinion with some of his Parishioners.--Sermon

Explaining his Views.--Resignation of his Pastorate.

CHAPTER IV.

1833-1838. AET. 30-35.

Section I. Visit to Europe.--On his Return preaches in Different

Places.--Emerson in the Pulpit.--At Newton.--Fixes his Residence at

Concord.--The Old Manse.--Lectures in Boston.--Lectures on

Michael Angelo and on Milton published in the "North American

Review."--Beginning of the Correspondence with Carlyle.--Letters to the

Rev. James Freeman Clarke.--Republication of "Sartor Resartus."

Section 2. Emerson's Second Marriage.--His New Residence in

Concord.--Historical Address.--Course of Ten Lectures on English

Literature delivered in Boston.--The Concord Battle Hymn.--Preaching

in Concord and East Lexington.--Accounts of his Preaching by

Several Hearers.--A Course of Lectures on the Nature and Ends of

History.--Address on War.--Death of Edward Bliss Emerson.--Death of

Charles Chauncy Emerson.

Section 3. Publication of "Nature."--Outline of this Essay.--Its

Reception.--Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society

CHAPTER V.

1838-1843. AET. 35-40.

Section 1. Divinity School Address.--Correspondence.--Lectures on Human

Life.--Letters to James Freeman Clarke.--Dartmouth College Address:

Literary Ethics.--Waterville College Address: The Method of

Nature.--Other Addresses: Man the Reformer.--Lecture on the Times.--The

Conservative.--The Transcendentalist.--Boston "Transcendentalism."--"The

Dial."--Brook Farm.