was about eight years older than Motley, and much less impulsive and
more discreet, his death was to his friend irreparable, and at the
time an overwhelming blow."

Mr. Stackpole was a man of great intelligence, of remarkable personal
attractions, and amiable character. His death was a loss to Motley even
greater than he knew, for he needed just such a friend, older, calmer,
more experienced in the ways of the world, and above all capable of
thoroughly understanding him and exercising a wholesome influence over
his excitable nature without the seeming of a Mentor preaching to a
Telemachus. Mr. Stackpole was killed by a railroad accident on the 20th
of July, 1847.

In the same letter Mr. Amory refers to a very different experience in Mr.
Motley's life,--his one year of service as a member of the Massachusetts
House of Representatives, 1849.

"In respect to the one term during which he was a member of the
Massachusetts House of Representatives, I can recall only one thing,
to which he often and laughingly alluded. Motley, as the Chairman
of the Committee on Education, made, as he thought, a most masterly
report. It was very elaborate, and, as he supposed, unanswerable;
but Boutwell, then a young man from some country town [Groton,
Mass.], rose, and as Motley always said, demolished the report, so
that he was unable to defend it against the attack. You can imagine
his disgust, after the pains he had taken to render it unassailable,
to find himself, as he expressed it, 'on his own dunghill,'
ignominiously beaten. While the result exalted his opinion of the
speech-making faculty of a Representative of a common school
education, it at the same time cured him of any ambition for