uld 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 Unit