tley has not always been successful in keeping the graphic variety
of his details subordinate to the main theme of his work." Still, he
excuses the fault, as he accounts it, in consideration of the new light
thrown on various obscure points of history, and--

"it is atoned for by striking merits, by many narratives of great
events faithfully, powerfully, and vividly executed, by the clearest
and most life-like conceptions of character, and by a style which,
if it sacrifices the severer principles of composition to a desire
to be striking and picturesque, is always vigorous, full of
animation, and glowing with the genuine enthusiasm of the writer.
Mr. Motley combines as an historian two qualifications seldom found
united,--to great capacity for historical research he adds much
power of pictorial representation. In his pages we find characters
and scenes minutely set forth in elaborate and characteristic
detail, which is relieved and heightened in effect by the artistic
breadth of light and shade thrown across the broader prospects of
history. In an American author, too, we must commend the hearty
English spirit in which the book is written; and fertile as the
present age has been in historical works of the highest merit, none
of them can be ranked above these volumes in the grand qualities of
interest, accuracy, and truth."

A writer in "Blackwood" (May, 1861) contrasts Motley with Froude somewhat
in the way in which another critic had contrasted him with Prescott.
Froude, he says, remembers that there are some golden threads in the
black robe of the Dominican. Motley "finds it black and thrusts it
farther into the darkness."

Every writer carries more or less of his own character into his book, of
course. A great professor has told me that there is a personal flavor in
the mathematical work of a man of genius like Poisson. Those who have
known Motley and Prescott would feel sure beforehand that the impulsive
nature of the one and the judicial serenity of the other would as surely
betray themselves in their writings as in their conversation and in their
every movement. Another point which the critic of "Blackwood's Magazine"
has noticed has not been so generally observed: it is what he calls "a
dashing, offhand, rattling style,"--"fast" writing. It cannot be denied
that here and there may be detected slight vestiges of the way of writing
of an earlier period of Motley'