FIRST HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS.--PETER THE GREAT.--NOVELS OF
BALZAC.--POLITY OF THE PURITANS.

Mr. Motley's first serious effort in historical composition was an
article of fifty pages in "The North American Review" for October, 1845.
This was nominally a notice of two works, one on Russia, the other "A
Memoir of the Life of Peter the Great." It is, however, a narrative
rather than a criticism, a rapid, continuous, brilliant, almost dramatic
narrative. If there had been any question as to whether the young
novelist who had missed his first mark had in him the elements which
might give him success as an author, this essay would have settled the
question. It shows throughout that the writer has made a thorough study
of his subject, but it is written with an easy and abundant, yet
scholarly freedom, not as if he were surrounded by his authorities and
picking out his material piece by piece, but rather as if it were the
overflow of long-pursued and well-remembered studies recalled without
effort and poured forth almost as a recreation.

As he betrayed or revealed his personality in his first novel, so in this
first effort in another department of literature he showed in epitome his
qualities as a historian and a biographer. The hero of his narrative
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