MOTLEY, John Lothrop (1814-1877), the well-known historian of the Dutch Republic, was born on 15th April 1814 at Dorchester, now a part of Boston, Massachusetts, and from 1827 was educated at Harvard, where he graduated in 1831. He then studied for two years at Göttingen and Berlin, and after a period of European travel, chiefly in Italy, returned to America in 1834, where he became a student of law, and ultimately was called to the bar. In 1837 he married, and two years afterwards he published anonymously his earliest literary work, a two-volume novel, entitled Morton’s Hope, or the Memoirs of a Young Provincial, which attained, and indeed deserved, only a moderate success. In 1841 he received his first diplomatic appointment, being made secretary of legation to the Russian mission, but, finding the atmosphere of St Petersburg uncongenial, he resigned his post within a few months and definitely resolved on a literary career. Besides contributing various historical and critical essays to the North American Review, he published in 1849, again anonymously, a second novel entitled Merry Mount, a Romance of the Massachusetts Colony. About the year 1846 the project of writing a history of Holland had begun to take shape in his mind, and he had already prepared a considerable quantity of MS., when, finding the materials at his disposal in the United States quite inadequate for the completion of his work, he resolved to migrate to Europe along with his family in 1851. The next five years were spent at Berlin, Dresden, Brussels, and the Hague in laborious investigation of the archives preserved in those capitals, and resulted in 1856 in the publication of The Rise of the, Dutch Republic, a History (London and New York, 3 vols. 8vo). This work, which, after a large historical ...