himself not unknown as a writer, being the author of one or more of the
well remembered "Jack Downing" letters. He was fond of having the boys
read to him from such authors as Channing and Irving, and criticised
their way of reading with discriminating judgment and taste. Mrs. Motley
was a woman who could not be looked upon without admiration. I remember
well the sweet dignity of her aspect, her "regal beauty," as Mr. Phillips
truly styles it, and the charm of her serene and noble presence, which
made her the type of a perfect motherhood. Her character corresponded to
the promise of her gracious aspect. She was one of the fondest of
mothers, but not thoughtlessly indulgent to the boy from whom she hoped
and expected more than she thought it wise to let him know. The story
used to be current that in their younger days this father and mother were
the handsomest pair the town of Boston could show. This son of theirs
was "rather tall," says Mr. Phillips, "lithe, very graceful in movement
and gesture, and there was something marked and admirable in the set of
his head on his shoulders,"--a peculiar elegance which was most
noticeable in those later days when I knew him. Lady Byron long
afterwards spoke of him as more like her husband in appearance than any
other person she had met; but Mr. Phillips, who remembers the first bloom
of his boyhood and youth, thinks he was handsomer than any portrait of
Byron represents the poet. "He could not have been eleven years old,"
says the same correspondent, "when he began writing a novel. It opened,
I remember, not with one solitary horseman, but with two, riding up to an
inn in the valley of the Housatonic. Neither of us had ever seen the
Housatonic, but it sounded grand and romantic. Two chapters were
finished."


There is not much remembered of the single summer he passed at Mr.
Green's school at Jamaica Plain. From that school he went to Round