=O. W. Holmes=: _John Lothrop Motley, a Memoir_, 1879. =G. W. Curtis= (edited): _The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley, D. C. L._, 1889. I HIS LIFE Motley was born at Dorchester, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1814. His great-grandfather, John Motley, came from Belfast, Ireland, early in the Eighteenth Century, and settled at Falmouth, now Portland, Maine. His father, Thomas Motley, a prosperous merchant of Boston, married Anna Lothrop, daughter of the Reverend John Lothrop. The historian, the second-born of their eight children, was named in honor of his maternal grandfather. After a course of study under Cogswell and Bancroft at the Round Hill School, Motley entered Harvard College and was graduated in 1831. He was noted both at Northampton and Cambridge for intellectual brilliancy rather than studiousness, for a regal manner which did not tend to make him universally popular, and for rare personal beauty as was becoming in a youth whose parents were reputed in their younger days ‘the handsomest pair the town of Boston could show.’ He was a wit. ‘Give me the luxuries of life and I will dispense with the necessaries,’ is one of his best-known sayings. His passions were literary, he admired Shelley and enjoyed the cleverness of Praed. Although fond of versifying, he seems to have printed little or nothing. After graduation Motley spent two years (1832–33) at German universities. He went first to Göttingen, where he made the acquaintance of Bismarck. They were fellow-students the next year at Berlin. ‘We lived in closest intimacy, sharing meals and outdoor exercise,’ said Bismarck in a letter to Holmes. His period of foreign study having come to an end, Motley read law in Boston and was admitted to the bar. In 1837 he married Miss Mary Benjamin, a young woman noted for her beauty, cleverness, and an open-hearted sincerity which ‘made her seem like a sister to those who could help becoming her lovers.’[46] Two years after his marriage Motley made his literary beginning by publishing a novel, _Morton’s Hope, or the Memoirs of a Provincial_, and in 1849 he published yet another, _Merry-Mount, a Romance of the Massachusetts Colony_. Neither was successful. Perhaps the second failure was required to emphasize the lesson taught by the first, that the author’s gifts were not for imaginative work.[47] He was more fortunate with a group of three essays printed in the ‘North American Review,’ one on ‘Peter the Great’ (1845), one on ‘Balzac’ (1847), the third on ‘The Polity of the Puritans’ (1849).