Tandem fit surculus arbor: the twig which Mr. Motley in his earlier volumes has described as slowly putting forth its leaves and rootless, while painfully struggling for existence in a hostile soil, has at last grown into a mighty tree of liberty, drawing sustenance from all lands, and protecting all civilized peoples with its pleasant shade. We congratulate Mr. Motley upon the successful completion of the second portion of his great work; and we think that the Netherlanders of our time have reason to be grateful to the writer who has so faithfully and eloquently told the story of their country's fearful struggle against civil and ecclesiastical tyranny, and its manifold contributions to the advancement of European civilization. Mr. Motley has been fortunate in his selection of a subject upon which to write. Probably no century of modern times lends itself to the purposes of the descriptive historian so well as the sixteenth. While on the one hand the problems which it presents are sufficiently near for us to understand them without too great an effort of the imagination, on the other hand they are sufficiently remote for us to study them without passionate and warping prejudice. The contest between Catholicism and the reformed religion--between ecclesiastical autocracy and the right of private investigation--has become a thing of the past, and constitutes a closed chapter in human history. The epoch which begins where Mr. Motley's history is designed to close--at the peace of Westphalia--is far more complicated. Since the middle of the seventeenth century a double movement has been going on in religion and philosophy, society and politics,--a movement of destruction typified by Voltaire and Rousseau, and a constructive movement represented by Diderot and Lessing. We are still living in the midst of this great epoch: the questions which it presents are liable to disturb our prejudices as well as to stimulate our reason; the results to which it must sooner or later attain can now be only partially foreseen; and even its present tendencies are generally misunderstood, and in many quarters wholly ignored. With the sixteenth century, as we have said, the case is far different. The historical problem is far less complex. The issues at stake are comparatively simple, and the historian has before him a straightforward story.