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John Lothrop Motley. a memoir — Volume 2 by Oliver Wendell Holmes
page 39 of 68 (57%)
as entitling him to the honors too often grudged to the living to be
wasted on the dead. The speaker only gave voice to the widely prevailing
feelings which had led to his receiving the invitation to speak. The
time was one which called for outspoken utterance, and there was not a
listener whose heart did not warm as he heard the glowing words in which
the speaker recorded the noble achievements of the soldier who must in so
many ways have reminded him of his favorite character, William the
Silent.

On the 16th of December of this same year, 1868, Mr. Motley delivered an
address before the New York Historical Society, on the occasion of the
sixty-fourth anniversary of its foundation. The president of the
society, Mr. Hamilton Fish, introduced the speaker as one "whose name
belongs to no single country, and to no single age. As a statesman and
diplomatist and patriot, he belongs to America; as a scholar, to the
world of letters; as a historian, all ages will claim him in the future."

His subject was "Historic Progress and American Democracy." The
discourse is, to use his own words, "a rapid sweep through the eons and
the centuries," illustrating the great truth of the development of the
race from its origin to the time in which we are living. It is a long
distance from the planetary fact of the obliquity of the equator, which
gave the earth its alternation of seasons, and rendered the history, if
not the existence of man and of civilization a possibility, to the
surrender of General Lee under the apple-tree at Appomattox Court-House.
No one but a scholar familiar with the course of history could have
marshalled such a procession of events into a connected and intelligible
sequence. It is indeed a flight rather than a march; the reader is borne
along as on the wings of a soaring poem, and sees the rising and decaying
empires of history beneath him as a bird of passage marks the succession
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