niards and Calvinists;
and wrote all the better for this bias. He was an admirable sketcher
of historical portraits, and had Macaulay's skill in composing special
chapters devoted to the tendencies and qualities of an epoch or to the
characteristics of a dynasty. Between 1860 and 1868 he produced the four
volumes of the "History of the United Netherlands." During the Civil
War he served usefully as American minister to Vienna, and in 1869 was
appointed minister to London. Both of these appointments ended unhappily
for him. Dr. Holmes, his loyal admirer and biographer, does not conceal
the fact that a steadier, less excitable type of public servant might
have handled both the Vienna situation and the London situation without
incurring a recall. Motley continued to live in England, where his
daughters had married, and where, in spite of his ardent Americanism, he
felt socially at home. His last book was "The Life and Death of John
of Barneveld." His "Letters," edited after his death in 1877 by George
William Curtis, give a fascinating picture of English life among the
cultivated and leisurely classes. The Boston merchant's son was a
high-hearted gentleman, and his cosmopolitan experiences used to make
his stay-at-home friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, feel rather dull and
provincial in comparison. Both were Sons of Liberty, but Motley had had
the luck to find in "brave little Holland" a subject which captivated
the interest of Europe and gave the historian international fame. He had
more eloquence than the Doctor, and a far more varied range of prose,
but there may be here and there a Yankee guesser about the taste of
future generations who will bet on "The Autocrat," after all.

The character and career of Francis Parkman afford curious material to
the student of New England's golden age. In the seventy years of his
heroic life, from 1823 to 1893, all the characteristic forces of the age
reached their culmination and decline, and his own personality
indicates some of the violent reactions produced by the over-strain
of Transcendentalism. For here was a descendant of John Cotton, and a
clergyman's son, who detested Puritanism and the clergy; who, coming to
manhood in the eighteen-forties, hated the very words Transcendentalism,
Philosophy, Religion, Reform; an inheritor of property, trained at
Harvard, and an Overseer and Fellow of his University, who disliked the
ideals of culture and refinement; a member of the Saturday Clu