United States or United States Virgin Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In this house the two young students, Appleton and Motley, lived during a part of their college course. "Motley's room was on the ground floor, the room to the left of the entrance. He led a very pleasant life there, tempering his college duties with the literature he loved, and receiving his friends amidst elegant surroundings, which added to the charm of his society.
Another point which the critic of "Blackwood's Magazine" has noticed has not been so generally observed: it is what he calls "a dashing, offhand, rattling style," "fast" writing. It cannot be denied that here and there may be detected slight vestiges of the way of writing of an earlier period of Motley's literary life, with which I have no reason to think the writer just mentioned was acquainted.
Motley's offending by italicizing three very brief passages from his conversation at this interview; not discreetly, as it seems to me, for they will not bear the strain that is put upon them. These are the passages: "but that such, measures must always be taken with a full view of the grave responsibilities assumed." 2.
Motley's dismissal very neatly, but for the inexorable facts about its date, as revealed by the London "Times." It betrays itself as an afterthought, and its failure as a defence reminds us too nearly of the trial in which Mr. Webster said suicide is confession.
But we have no space, in this hurried notice of Mr. Motley's work, to linger on the fertile topics which his luminous narrative suggests. In a future article we hope to do some justice to the facts, principles, and judgments he has established.
I also remark that the winter evenings, through their very length, allow great swing for indulgences. Few young men would have the taste to go to their room at seven o'clock, and sit until eleven, reading Motley's Dutch Republic or John Foster's Essays. The young men who have been confined to the store all day want fresh air and sight-seeing; and they must go somewhere.
I suppose they stopped there, but I am not sure. No wonder the romancer humorously added a touch that made a spider of the doctor himself, with his vast web of pipe-smoke! The great romance of "Monte Beni" is thus referred to by Mr. Motley and his wife; I give a few sentences written by the latter, a friend of many years' standing, and I insert Mr. Motley's letter entire:
He is above and we upon earth; therefore it behoveth our words to be wary and few." Mrs. Motley's illness was not a long one, and the nature of it was such that its course could with certainty be predicted. Mr. Motley and her children passed the remaining days of her life, extending over about a month, with her, in the mutual under standing that she was soon to part from them.
His death, I am sure, is mourned to-day by the representatives of the historic names of Austria and Hungary, and by the surviving diplomats then residing near the Court of Vienna, wherever they may still be found, headed by their venerable Doyen, the Baron de Heckeren." The story of Mr. Motley's resignation of his office and its acceptance by the government is this.
On one of Motley's most glowing pages, we are told how, after the frightful siege and fall of Haarlem, and with Alkmaar closely invested by the Duke of Alva, when the cause of the Netherlands seemed in direst straits, Diedrich Sonoy, the lieutenant governor of North Holland, wrote the Prince of Orange, inquiring whether he had arranged some foreign alliance, and received the reply: "You ask if I have entered into a firm treaty with any great king or potentate; to which I answer, that before I ever took up the cause of the oppressed Christians in these provinces, I had entered into a close alliance with the King of kings; and I am firmly convinced that all who put their trust in Him shall be saved by His almighty hand.
Word Of The Day