rieved by his failure. And
this good feeling on the part of the public he owes, in a great degree,
to the individuality he has impressed upon his work. That individuality
is not the individuality of a partisan or of a theorist, but the
individuality of a broad-minded, high-minded, chivalrous gentleman. With
a soul open to the finest sentiments and ideas of the age in which he
lives, tolerant of frailty, but intolerant of meanness, falsehood, and
malignity, and writing with the frankness with which a cultivated man of
decided opinions might speak to a company of chosen associates, the
most obstinate bigot can hardly fail to feel the charm of his free
and cordial manner of expression. Hume, Gibbon, Hallam, and Macaulay,
Sismondi, Guizot, and Michelet, all have in their characters something
which invites and provokes opposition. But the spirit which underlies
Mr. Motley's large scholarship is so thoroughly genial and generous,
and is so purified from the pedantry of knowledge and the pedantry of
opinion, that it is impossible for him to rouse in other minds any of
the antipathy which is often felt for powerful individualities whose
powers of mind and extent of erudition still enforce respect and extort
admiration. The instinctive sympathy he thus creates is due to no lack
of intrepidity in expressing his love for what is right and his hatred
for what is wrong. No historian is more decisive in his judgments, or
more scornful of the arts and hypocrisies by which the champions of
opposite opinions are flattered and propitiated. But his spirit is that
of the knight "without reproach," as well as the knight "without fear";
and even his adversaries cannot but delight in the singleness and
simplicity of purpose with which he strives after the truth. Nothing in
his position or in his character gives them the slightest pretence for
supposing that his bold advocacy of liberal views is connected with any
ulterior designs or any "fatted calf" of theory or office. While he
is thus healthily free from the taint of the partisan, he is also
independent of the austere insensibility of the judicial Pharisee, whose
boast is that he decides questions relating to human nature without any
admixture of human instinct and human feeling. Mr. Motley, throughout
his History, writes from his heart as well as from his head; and we have
been unable to discover that he has swerved from the truth of things by
allowing his narrative to be vitiated by an und