Winsor has written on our antiquities; Baird
has written an exhaustive and competent history of the Huguenots, a
series one will do more than well to read. Many scholars have written
comparatively brief memoirs of the United States. Localities and
States and single villages have had their historians; but the
commanding figures whose faces fill the canvas, so to say,--of them
this appreciation is written, to point youth to an Oregon of delight,
where their leisure may stray with abundant profit and increasing
pleasure, and, as I hope, with growing pride in American literature, so
that they may make mental boast of America's sons, who have been stanch
to enjoy and study the history of their own native land.

My final word is of that brilliant, irascible, and impressible
American, John Lothrop Motley, historian of the Dutch Republic; and
fitting it is that a native of the first great stable Republic was
drawn to study the European Republic which rose at the touch of William
the Silent's genius, and sank back into lethargy of kingship when the
blood of the tragic and heroic inauguration was all spilt. The contact
of the United Netherlands with American history and future is known to
all. From the Netherlands the Puritans set sail to found what proved
to be a colony and Republic. The extent to which the Netherlands
exercised an influence in shaping the future of the American
Commonwealth has not been determined, and can not be, though Douglas
Campbell has maintained that to the Dutch, and not to the English
Puritan, nor yet to the Magna Charta, does the American Republic owe
its chief debt. The theme is productive and stimulative and worthy,
though the facts are indeterminate. America is attached to the Dutch
Republic as a bold attempt whose failure was nobler than many
successes. The Puritan exodus from Holland, when Pastor John Robinson
prayed, preached, and prophesied, is one of the most thrilling events
recorded of the seventeenth century--a century crowded with doings that
thrill the flesh like a bugle-call.

Motley's histories are "The Rise of the Dutch Republic," "The United
Netherlands," and "John of Barneveld," a series which, for brilliancy
of characterization of men and times and events, and interest
stimulated and held, may rank, without hyperbole, with the writings of
Lord Macaulay. Both are always special pleaders, as I am of opinion
history ought probably to be, seeing that it is human nature, and w