Shortly after the fall of Fort Sumter, Motley published in the London ‘Times’ two letters on the significance and justice of the war. They had a marked effect in England and were reprinted in America. In June, 1861, the Austrian government having refused to accept the minister sent to Vienna, Motley was accredited to the mission. After discharging the duties of his office with marked ability during the four troubled years of Lincoln’s administration, and through two years of Johnson’s, he resigned because of an affront offered him by his own government.[48] During the political campaign of 1868 Motley gave an address in Music Hall, Boston, on ‘Four Questions for the People at the Presidential Election.’ On December 16, as orator at the sixty-first anniversary of the New York Historical Society, he spoke on ‘Historic Progress and American Democracy.’ In the spring of 1869 President Grant assigned Motley to the English mission, and in July, 1870, recalled him. The reasons given for this summary act have never been satisfactory to Motley’s friends. It is a question for experts. If Motley’s indiscretion (or offence) was great, his punishment was severe, and the manner of it not undeserving of the epithet brutal.[49] Motley’s health is believed to have been affected by distress of mind over the recall. But the real disaster of his latter years was the loss of his wife. He survived her only two and a half years. His death occurred at Kingston Russell, near Dorchester, England, on May 29, 1877. Dean Stanley in his tribute to Motley at Westminster Abbey used the striking phrase, ‘an historian at once so ardent and so laborious.’ J. R. Green, who heard the sermon, thought the phrase ‘most happy.’ Said Green: ‘I should have liked Stanley to have pointed out the thing which strikes me most in Motley, that alone of all men past and present he knit together not only America and England, but that Older England which we left on Frisian shores, and which grew into the United Netherlands. A child of America, the historian of Holland, he made England his adopted country, and in England his body lies.’ II HIS CHARACTER Motley’s letters afford the best insight into his generous, affectionate, richly endowed, and manly nature. They mirror his complete happiness in the home circle, his chivalrous devotion to the woman of his choice, his loyalty to his friends, and his passionate love of native land. They do not show--nor was it intended by the editor that they should--his fiery impatience, his quick resentment, his sensitive pride, his occasional and pardonable bitterness.