son to think the writer just mentioned was acquainted. Now and then I
can trace in the turn of a phrase, in the twinkle of an epithet, a faint
reminiscence of a certain satirical levity, airiness, jauntiness, if I
may hint such a word, which is just enough to remind me of those perilous
shallows of his early time through which his richly freighted argosy had
passed with such wonderful escape from their dangers and such very slight
marks of injury. That which is pleasant gayety in conversation may be
quite out of place in formal composition, and Motley's wit must have had
a hard time of it struggling to show its spangles in the processions
while his gorgeous tragedies went sweeping by.

JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.

A MEMOIR

By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Volume II.

XVI.

1860-1866. AEt. 46-52.

RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND.--OUTBREAK OF THE CIVIL WAR.--LETTERS TO THE LONDON
"TIMES."--VISIT TO AMERICA.--APPOINTED MINISTER TO AUSTRIA.--LADY
HARCOURT'S LETTER.--MISS MOTLEY'S MEMORANDUM.

The winter of 1859-60 was passed chiefly at Oatlands Hotel,
Walton-on-Thames. In 1860 Mr. Motley hired the house No. 31 Hertford
Street, May Fair, London. He had just published the first two volumes of
his "History of the Netherlands," and was ready for the further labors of
its continuation, when the threats, followed by the outbreak, of the
great civil contention in his native land brought him back from the
struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the conflict of
the nineteenth.

His love of country, which had grown upon him so remarkably of late
years, would not suffer him to be silent at such a moment. All around him
he found ignorance and prejudice. The quarrel was like to be prejudged in
default of a champion of the cause which to him was that of Liberty and
Justice. He wrote two long letters to the London "Times," in which he
attempted to make clear to Englishmen and to Europe the nature and
conditions of our complex system of government, the real cause of the
strife, and the mighty issues at stake. Nothing could have been more
timely, nothing more needed. Mr. William Everett, who was then in
England, bears strong testimony to the effect these letters produced. Had
Mr. Motley done no other service to his country, this alone would entitle
him to honorable remembrance as among the first defenders of the flag,
which at that moment had more to fear from what was going on in the
cabinet councils of Europe than