the sarcastic Schlosser, 'wrote memoirs after the
French fashion for good society,' yet whom the arbitrary and adventurous
Bolingbroke does not scruple to declare 'in many respects the equal of
Livy!' And yet no single stroke is omitted which is needed to preserve
the unity of the work. Tacitus himself did not embellish with more
commanding morality his histories. The jots and tittles of the _Groot
Privilegie_, the terms of the famous 'Pacification of Ghent,' the
solemn import of the _Act of Adjuration_, and the political ambition of
the church, are as faithfully drawn as the Siege of Leyden, or the
'Spanish Fury' of Antwerp.

Hume, in the narrowness of a so-called philosophical indifference to the
appeals of domestic life and the details of national theology and art,
gives us only a running commentary upon mere chronological events,
galvanized by the touch of his keen intellect and fine rhetoric into a
deceitful vigor, and ornamented with the poisonous night-shade blossoms
of a spurious philosophy. We may more justly seek some analogy between
Gibbon and Motley, even if the search but discover points of difference
so radical that a comparison is impossible. The solemn, measured, and
splendid rhetoric of Gibbon is met by the animated, impetuous, and
brilliant flow of Motley's thought. Neither leans to the ideal; with
both the actual prevails. The policy of a government is summoned by
neither before the partial tribunal of a sentiment, or the intricate
scheme of some Machiavelli subjected to the imperfect analysis of a
headstrong imagination. But Gibbon, though he writes in the vernacular,
has lost all the honest nationality that should give an air of sincerity
to his work; his brilliant antithesis belongs to the ornate school of
the French literature of the day; and, fascinating as is the pomp and
commanding march of his sentences, we are rather dazzled by his
eloquence than convinced by his argument. He is picturesque, rich; but
it is the picturesqueness and richness of the truly bewildering Roman
architecture of the Renaissance--half Byzantine, three-eighths Gothic,
and the remainder Greek. But Motley, with all his varied learning and
association, is still perfectly and nobly Anglo-Saxon. His short,
epigrammatic sentences ring like the click of musketry before the
charge, and swell into length and grandeur with the progress of his
theme. The simplicity, not of ignorance but of genius, characterizes
him. He does not cat