me all Europe with jealousy and
cupidity, and to dictate to empires the very terms of their existence.
And this element was LABOR. The rich lowlands of the 'double-armed'
Rhine teemed with a busy life, that, king-like, demanded a tribute of
the sea, and wrenched from the greedy waves a treasure that its industry
made priceless. Each man became a prince in his own divine right, and
every occupation had its lords and its lore, its 'mysteries,' and its
social rights. The seamen, merchants, and artisans of the Netherlands
had made their country the richest in Europe. They ranged the seas and
learned the value of the land; and while they fed the great despot of
the Middle Ages, the light of intelligence, born of energy and nurtured
by activity, cast its benignant gleams from the central island of the
Rhine, and drove from their mountain nooks the owls and bats of tyranny
and superstition. They fought first, these lords of the soil, among
themselves, for local privileges, advancing in their continuous
struggles upon the very threshold of the church. By strong alliances
they kept at bay their feudal lords, and fettered the ecclesiastical
power with the yoke of a justice, meagre, indeed, and sadly unfruitful,
but still ominous of a better day. Within the alabaster vase of
despotism, frail, yet old as ambition, the lamp of freedom had long
burned dimly: now its flames were licking, with serpent-like tongues,
the enclosure so long deemed sacred, and threatened, as they dyed the
air with their amber flood of light, to shiver their temple to
fragments. The theory of the divine right of kings was but another 'Luck
of Edenhall.' Its slender stem trembled now within the rough grasp of
the sacrilegious and burly Netherlanders, who hesitated not long ere
they dashed it with the old superstition to the ground, shaking the
civilized world to its centre by the shock. But out of the ruins a
statelier edifice was to rise, whose windows, like those of the old
legend, were stained by the lifeblood of its architect.

The historian who would worthily depict such an age, such a people, such
principles, must be an artist, but one in whom the creative faculty does
not blind the moral obligations. He must bring to the work a republican
sympathy, must be governed by a republican justice, and wear a character
as noble as the struggle that he paints. And such an artist, such a
historian, such a man, we have in JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.

The honors of Harva