"I can vouch for its extraordinary accuracy both of narration and of portrait-painting. You do not look at people or events from my point of view, but I am, therefore, a better witness to your fairness and clearness of delineation and statement. You have by nature the judicial mind which is the _costume de rigueur_ of all historians.... I haven't the least of it--I am always in a passion when I write and so shall be accused, very justly perhaps, of the qualities for which Byron commended Mitford, 'wrath and partiality.'" The two men, indeed, approached their subject in very different fashion. In Motley, rigidly scientific though he was, there are always a touch of emotion, a love of liberty, a hatred of oppression. He once wrote to his father that it gratified him "to pitch into the Duke of Alva and Philip II. to my heart's content." Prescott, on the other hand, was more detached, partly because he was by nature tolerant and calm; and it may be also because his protracted Spanish studies had given him unconsciously the Spanish point of view. He even came at last to adopt this theory himself, and he wrote of it in a humorous way. Thus to Lady Lyell, he declared:-- "If I should go to heaven ... I shall find many acquaintances there, and some of them very respectable, of the olden time.... Don't you think I should have a kindly greeting from good Isabella? Even Bloody Mary, I think, will smile on me; for I love the old Spanish stock, the house of Trastamara. But there is one that I am sure will owe me a grudge, and that is the very man I have been making two good volumes upon. With all my good nature, I can't wash him even into the darkest French grey. He is black and all black.... Is it not charitable to give Philip a place in heaven?" Again, he styles Philip one "who may be considered as to other Catholics what a Puseyite is to other Protestants." And elsewhere he confesses to "a sneaking fondness for Philip." It was very like him, this hesitation to condemn; and it recalls a memorandum which he made while writing his _Peru_: "never call hard names à la Southey." Hence in a letter of his to Motley, who had sent him a copy of the _Dutch Republic_,--a letter which forms an interesting complement to Motley's note to him, he wrote:-- "You have laid it on Philip rather hard. Indeed, you have whittled him down to such an imperceptible point that there is hardly enough of him left to hang a newspaper paragraph on, much less five or six volumes of solid history as I propose to do. But then, you make it up with your own hero, William of Orange, and I comfort myself with the reflection that you are looking through a pair of Dutch spectacles after all."