military fame, the loftiest and purest and finest personal qualities are
not those which can be most depended upon at the ballot-box. Strange
stories are told of avowed opposition to Mr. Motley on the ground of the
most trivial differences in point of taste in personal matters,--so told
that it is hard to disbelieve them, and they show that the caprices which
we might have thought belonged exclusively to absolute rulers among their
mistresses or their minions may be felt in the councils of a great people
which calls itself self-governing. It is perfectly true that Mr. Motley
did not illustrate the popular type of politician. He was too high-
minded, too scholarly, too generously industrious, too polished, too much
at home in the highest European circles, too much courted for his
personal fascinations, too remote from the trading world of caucus
managers. To degrade him, so far as official capital punishment could do
it, was not merely to wrong one whom the nation should have delighted to
honor as showing it to the world in the fairest flower of its young
civilization, but it was an indignity to a representative of the highest
scholarship of native growth, which every student in the land felt as a
discouragement to all sound learning and noble ambition.

If he was disappointed in his diplomatic career, he had enough, and more
than enough, to console him in his brilliant literary triumphs. He had
earned them all by the most faithful and patient labor. If he had not
the "frame of adamant" of the Swedish hero, he had his "soul of fire."
No labors could tire him, no difficulties affright him. What most
surprised those who knew him as a young man was, not his ambition, not
his brilliancy, but his dogged, continuous capacity for work. We have
seen with what astonishment the old Dutch scholar, Groen van Prinsterer,
looked upon a man who had wrestled with authors like Bor and Van Meteren,
who had grappled with the mightiest folios and toiled undiscouraged among
half-illegible manuscript records. Having spared no pains in collecting