key-note of his destiny. To be counted the follower of Cooper was not
the meet guerdon of an intellect to which the shapely monuments of
ancient literature yielded the clue to their hieroglyphic labyrinths of
knowledge, and that pierced with lightning swiftness the shell of
events, and possessed the latent principles of life in their warm
hearts. He returned, therefore, to Europe, leaving behind him a
reputation which at no distant day was destined to spring from a new and
more noble foundation into a lasting and more stately pile.

To a mind like Motley's, the department of history presented the most
attractive features. There could honestly be no dabbling with the
specious and seductive alchemy of Fiction. Truth had molded every period
of the world's life. Truth defied had tripped up nations in their
headlong race after dominion and unrighteous power. Truth victorious had
smiled upon their steady growth to greatness and honor. To write history
was to write poetry, art, philosophy, religion, life. The pen that
sketched the rise, the progress, and the fate of nations, was in fact
the chisel of a sculptor, whose theme was humanity.

And what work so fitting for the American author as the record of a
nation struggling away from the oppression of feudal institutions, which
stifled all growth either towards knowledge or civil greatness,
throwing off the trammels of religious intolerance, defying the most
powerful nation of Christendom, which had breathed an air of bigotry in
its long contest with the Moors, and waging an exhaustive war of nearly
a century's duration against fearful odds, only to win an independent
existence? We had treasured as rare heirlooms the Mechlin laces of our
grandmothers, had our favorite sets of Tournay porcelain, awaited with
curious and enthusiastic patience our shares in the floral exportations
of Harlem, trodden daily the carpetings of Brussels, and esteemed
ourselves rich with a fragment of its tapestry, or a rifle of Namur; we
had honored the vast manufacturing interest of the Netherlands, their
commercial prosperity and noble enterprise; but here all thought of them
had ended. Schiller had not taught us that the ancestors of the miners
of Mons, the artisans of Brussels, the seamen of Antwerp, the professors
of Leyden, were heroes, worthy to stand beside Leonidas and Bozzaris;
Strada had failed to rouse us to enthusiasm at the thought of their
long, noble battle for life. Grotius had indee