apers,
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, whi