t the
hodge-podge, be good-natured if possible, and laugh,

'As from the height of contemplation
We view the feeble joints men totter on.'

"I began a tremendous political career during the election, having
made two stump speeches of an hour and a half each,--after you went
away,--one in Dedham town-hall and one in Jamaica Plain, with such
eminent success that many invitations came to me from the
surrounding villages, and if I had continued in active political
life I might have risen to be vote-distributor, or fence-viewer, or
selectman, or hog-reeve, or something of the kind."

The letter from which the above passages are quoted gives the same
portrait of the writer, only seen in profile, as it were, which we have
already seen drawn in full face in the story of "Morton's Hope." It is
charged with that 'saeva indignatio' which at times verges on
misanthropic contempt for its objects, not unnatural to a high-spirited
young man who sees his lofty ideals confronted with the ignoble facts
which strew the highways of political life. But we can recognize real
conviction and the deepest feeling beneath his scornful rhetoric and his
bitter laugh. He was no more a mere dilettante than Swift himself, but
now and then in the midst of his most serious thought some absurd or
grotesque image will obtrude itself, and one is reminded of the lines on
the monument of Gay rather than of the fierce epitaph of the Dean of
Saint Patrick's.

VII.

1845-1847. AEt. 31-33.

FIRST HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS.--PETER THE GREAT.--NOVELS OF
BALZAC.--POLITY OF THE PURITANS.

Mr. Motley's first serious effort in historical composition was an
article of fifty pages in "The North American Review" for October, 1845.
This was nominally a notice of two works, one on Russia, the other "A
Memoir of the Life of Peter the Great." It is, however, a narrative
rather than a criticism, a rapid, continuous, brilliant, almost dramatic
narrative. If there had been any question as to whether the young
novelist who had missed his first mark had in him the elements which
might give him success as an author, this essay would have settled the
question. It shows throughout that the writer has made a thorough study
of his subject, but it is written with an easy and abundant, yet
scholarly freedom, not as if he were surrounded by his authorities and
picking out his material piece by piece, but rather as if it were