news then came to him as a blow. “For I had not,” Motley says, “first made up my mind to write a history, and then cast about to take up a subject. My subject had taken me up, drawn me on, and absorbed me into itself.” Prescott listened to the younger man’s proposal to retire, “with frank, ready, and liberal sympathy,” and insisted that Motley should proceed. More than this, he made handsome allusion, in the Preface to his “Philip,” to the forthcoming work on the revolt of the Netherlands. Motley wrote with zeal and enthusiasm. He loved liberty. The story of a people fighting for freedom fired his imagination. His ardour led him, naturally, toward the advocacy of favourite characters and parties; and the greater moderation of the Dutch historians themselves tends to support the charge of partiality. But Motley’s partiality was not mere partisanship. It rested upon a nice discrimination of the good and the bad, of the noble and the mean. His Dutch history is classic. It is renowned for its scholarly qualities and for its vivid colouring. Froude, without previous knowledge of the writer or of his work, placed “The Rise of the Dutch Republic” among “the finest histories in this or in any language.” While, by the more exacting standards of current schools, it is criticised for its lack of philosophical insight, it is still justly regarded as a faithful and striking picture of an heroic people. _Francis Parkman._--The New England School had told the story of the Spaniard in America and in the Netherlands. It was further to enrich its native literature by another brilliant history of the struggle for conquest of a great nation in foreign lands. Parkman (1823-93) is the historian of the rise and decline of France’s power in North America. Like Motley, he was captivated by an impressive and dramatic cycle of events, and--again like Motley--he possessed breadth of vision and tenacity of purpose sufficient to his task. Parkman had a passion for the wilderness;--a passion which he fed in youth and early manhood by excursions, large and small, to the woods, the prairies, and the mountains. In his twenties, he appears, a picturesque figure in the great West, living and hunting with Indians, eating pemmican, and playing host at a feast of dog-meat and tea. In spite of outdoor life and travel, Parkman was seldom well. A serious affection of the eyes, and nervous troubles which may have emanated from it, kept him, from his undergraduate days, either incapacitated or on the border-line of invalidism. He was tortured till his death by pain, lameness, insomnia, and at times almost complete blindness. His suffering and infirmities recall Prescott. It is not easy to decide which of the two men struggled more heroically against overwhelming odds. As early as his sophomore year at Harvard, Parkman planned to write the history of the “Old French War” for the conquest of Canada; “for here, as it seems to me,”--so he writes--“the forest drama was more stirring and