despotism, frail, yet old as ambition, the lamp of freedom had long burned dimly: now its flames were licking, with serpent-like tongues, the enclosure so long deemed sacred, and threatened, as they dyed the air with their amber flood of light, to shiver their temple to fragments. The theory of the divine right of kings was but another 'Luck of Edenhall.' Its slender stem trembled now within the rough grasp of the sacrilegious and burly Netherlanders, who hesitated not long ere they dashed it with the old superstition to the ground, shaking the civilized world to its centre by the shock. But out of the ruins a statelier edifice was to rise, whose windows, like those of the old legend, were stained by the lifeblood of its architect. The historian who would worthily depict such an age, such a people, such principles, must be an artist, but one in whom the creative faculty does not blind the moral obligations. He must bring to the work a republican sympathy, must be governed by a republican justice, and wear a character as noble as the struggle that he paints. And such an artist, such a historian, such a man, we have in JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY. The honors of Harvard, early and nobly earned, had given to the boy at seventeen the privileges and dignity of manhood. He was destined to become a scholar, eminent, even among the rarely and richly cultured minds of his own New England, for his universal knowledge, clearness of intellect, prompt energy, and indomitable perseverance. Inspired by these gifts and attainments, it was only natural, almost inevitable, that his first appearance upon the literary stage should have been in the _rôle_ of a novelist. The active young intellect was pliant and strong, but had not yet learned its power. Before him lay the broad fields of romance, fascinating with their royal _fleurs de lis_, rich with the contributions of every age, some quaint and laughter-moving, some pompous and exaggerated, some soul-stirring and grand. Impelled, perhaps, less by a thirst for fame than a desire to satisfy the resistless impulses of an energetic nature, and lay those fair ghosts of enterprises dimly recognized that beckoned him onward, he followed the first path that lay before him, and became a romance writer. His first work, _Morton's Hope, or the Memoirs of a Provincial_, was published in 1839, and subsequently appeared _Merry Mount, a Romance of Massachusetts_. It is curious to trace in these first flights of a genius that has since learned its legitimate field, a tendency to the breadth of Motley's later efforts, an instinctive and evidently unconscious passion for the descriptive, an admirably curbed yet still powerful impatience of the light fetters, the toy regulations of the realm of Fiction, and an earnestness that has since bloomed in the world of Fact and History. The very imperfections of the novelist have become the charms of the historian. His student-life in Germany, his after-plot