rtain Colonel
Waldron, an officer of some standing in the Revolutionary Army, with whom
he is said to have been constantly associated for some three months,
having arrived in America, as he says, on the 15th of May, that is to
say, six weeks or more before he sailed, according to his previous
account. Bohemia seems to have bewitched his chronology as it did
Shakespeare's geography. To have made his story a consistent series of
contradictions, Morton should have sailed from that Bohemian seashore
which may be found in "A Winter's Tale," but not in the map of Europe.

And yet in the midst of all these marks of haste and negligence, here and
there the philosophical student of history betrays himself, the ideal of
noble achievement glows in an eloquent paragraph, or is embodied in a
loving portrait like that of the professor and historian Harlem. The
novel, taken in connection with the subsequent developments of the
writer's mind, is a study of singular interest. It is a chaos before the
creative epoch; the light has not been divided from the darkness; the
firmament has not yet divided the waters from the waters. The forces at
work in a human intelligence to bring harmony out of its discordant
movements are as mysterious, as miraculous, we might truly say, as those
which give shape and order to the confused materials out of which
habitable worlds are evolved. It is too late now to be sensitive over
this unsuccessful attempt as a story and unconscious success as a
self-portraiture. The first sketches of Paul Veronese, the first patterns
of the Gobelin tapestry, are not to be criticised for the sake of
pointing out their inevitable and too manifest imperfections. They are to
be carefully studied as the earliest efforts of the hand which painted
the Marriage at Cana, of the art which taught the rude fabrics made to be
trodden under foot to rival the glowing canvas of the great painters.
None of Motley's subsequent writings give such an insight into his
character and mental history. It took many years to train the as yet
undisciplined powers into orderly obedience, and to bring the unarranged
materials into the organic connection which was needed in the
construction of a work that should endure. There was a long interval
between his early manhood and the middle term of life, during which the
slow process of evolution was going on. There are plants which open their
flowers with the first rays of the sun; there are others that wai