Hume, in the narrowness of a so-called philosophical indifference to the appeals of domestic life and the details of national theology and art, gives us only a running commentary upon mere chronological events, galvanized by the touch of his keen intellect and fine rhetoric into a deceitful vigor, and ornamented with the poisonous night-shade blossoms of a spurious philosophy. We may more justly seek some analogy between Gibbon and Motley, even if the search but discover points of difference so radical that a comparison is impossible. The solemn, measured, and splendid rhetoric of Gibbon is met by the animated, impetuous, and brilliant flow of Motley's thought. Neither leans to the ideal; with both the actual prevails. The policy of a government is summoned by neither before the partial tribunal of a sentiment, or the intricate scheme of some Machiavelli subjected to the imperfect analysis of a headstrong imagination. But Gibbon, though he writes in the vernacular, has lost all the honest nationality that should give an air of sincerity to his work; his brilliant antithesis belongs to the ornate school of the French literature of the day; and, fascinating as is the pomp and commanding march of his sentences, we are rather dazzled by his eloquence than convinced by his argument. He is picturesque, rich; but it is the picturesqueness and richness of the truly bewildering Roman architecture of the Renaissance--half Byzantine, three-eighths Gothic, and the remainder Greek. But Motley, with all his varied learning and association, is still perfectly and nobly Anglo-Saxon. His short, epigrammatic sentences ring like the click of musketry before the charge, and swell into length and grandeur with the progress of his theme. The simplicity, not of ignorance but of genius, characterizes him. He does not cater to our hungry fancy, he appeals grandly to our noblest impulses. In Motley a spirit of the most refined humanity is everywhere visible; he is guilty of no Voltairean satiric stabs at purity, no petulant Voltairean flings at the faith he does not share. All is manly, terse, frank, undisguised. Honorable himself, he does not, like Gibbon, distrust all mankind, and question with a sarcasm the very sincerity of a martyr at the stake.