makes his entrance at once in his character as the shipwright of Saardam,
on the occasion of a visit of the great Duke of Marlborough. The
portrait instantly arrests attention. His ideal personages had been
drawn in such a sketchy way, they presented so many imperfectly
harmonized features, that they never became real, with the exception,
of course, of the story-teller himself. But the vigor with which the
presentment of the imperial ship-carpenter, the sturdy, savage, eager,
fiery Peter, was given in the few opening sentences, showed the movement
of the hand, the glow of the color, that were in due time to display on a
broader canvas the full-length portraits of William the Silent and of
John of Barneveld. The style of the whole article is rich, fluent,
picturesque, with light touches of humor here and there, and perhaps a
trace or two of youthful jauntiness, not quite as yet outgrown. His
illustrative poetical quotations are mostly from Shakespeare,--from
Milton and Byron also in a passage or two,--and now and then one is
reminded that he is not unfamiliar with Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus" and
the "French Revolution" of the same unmistakable writer, more perhaps by
the way in which phrases borrowed from other authorities are set in the
text than by any more important evidence of unconscious imitation.


The readers who had shaken their heads over the unsuccessful story of
"Morton's Hope" were startled by the appearance of this manly and
scholarly essay. This young man, it seemed, had been studying,--studying
with careful accuracy, with broad purpose. He could paint a character
with the ruddy life-blood coloring it as warmly as it glows in the cheeks
of one of Van der Helst's burgomasters. He could sweep the horizon in a
wide general outlook, and manage his perspective and his lights and
shadows so as to place and accent his special subject with its due relief
and just relations. It was a sketch, or rather a study for a larger