There were a good many things said by him about the Nikolsburg Conference confirming what I had always understood.

"The military opinion was bent on going to Vienna after Sadowa. Bismarck strongly opposed this idea. He said it was absolutely necessary not to humiliate Austria, to do nothing that would make friendly relations with her in the future impossible. He said many people refused to speak to him. The events have entirely justified Bismarck's course, as all now agree. It would have been easy enough to go to Vienna or to Hungary, but to return would have been full of danger. I asked him if he was good friends with the Emperor of Austria now. He said Yes, that the Emperor was exceedingly civil to him last year at Salzburg, and crossed the room to speak to him as soon as he appeared at the door. He said he used when younger to think himself a clever fellow enough, but now he was convinced that nobody had any control over events-that nobody was really powerful or great, and it made him laugh when he heard himself complimented as wise, foreseeing, and exercising great influence over the world. A man in the situation in which he had been placed was obliged, while outsiders for example were speculating whether to-morrow it would be rain or sunshine, to decide promptly, it will rain, or it will be fine, and to act accordingly with all the forces at his command. If he guessed right, all the world said, What sagacity -what prophetic power! if wrong, all the old women would have beaten me with broomsticks.

If he had learned nothing else, he said he had learned modesty. Certainly a more unaffected mortal never breathed, nor a more genial one. He looks like a Colossus, but his health is somewhat shattered. He can never sleep until four or five in the morning. Of course work follows him here, but as far as I have yet seen it seems to trouble him but little. He looks like a country gentleman entirely at leisure.

'He talks away right and left about anything and everythingsays among other things that nothing could be a greater bêtise than for Germany to attack any foreign country-that if Russia were to offer the Baltic provinces as a gift, he would not accept them. As to Holland, it would be mere insanity to pretend to occupy or invade its independence. It had never occurred to him or to anybody. to Belgium, France would have made any terms at any time with Germany if allowed to take Belgium. I wish I could record the description he gave of his interviews with Jules Favre and afterwards with Thiers and Favre, when the peace was made.

As

'One trait I mustn't forget, however. Favre cried a little, or affected to cry, and was very pathetic and heroic. Bismarck said that he must not harangue him as if he were an assembly; they were two together on business purposes, and he was perfectly hardened against eloquence of any kind. Favre begged him not to mention that he had been so weak as to weep, and Bismarck was much diverted at finding in the printed account afterwards published by Favre that he made a great parade of the tears he had shed.'

At

At length, in 1874, was given to the world the last instalment of that great work which Motley had set himself, but which he never lived to complete, for the rude shocks which he had sustained in recent years had told severely on his health, and the end was rapidly drawing near. In the winter of 1873, he had been sent to Bournemouth, but without deriving much benefit from the change, though, on returning to London in June, he so far rallied as to be able to write, 'It is extraordinary how well I feel here,' but the improvement was but of short duration. In the spring he wrote to Dr. Holmes, 'I am physically a bankrupt, and, as months roll on, fear that this is my fate for what remains of life.' Moreover, Mrs. Motley's health had for some time past been a cause of grave anxiety, and on the last day of 1874, she who had been his stay and support in all his labours and troubles, was taken away from him. There remains but little to tell. Tended by the loving care of his daughters and cheered by the companionship of his grandchildren, he was, in spite of failing health and strength, able to enjoy the society of his friends, and to pay a few visits, till on the 29th of May, 1877, he suddenly passed away at Kingston Russell, the seat of the Sheridans, to whom he was connected by the marriage of his daughter to the nephew of his old friend Mrs. Norton.

We have in the foregoing pages dwelt more than once on Motley's prejudices, and on the strength with which those prejudices were expressed; and this marked trait of his character brings out into all the stronger relief the gentleness, which in these latter years of his life is markedly apparent in all his letters. Within a few weeks of his death, he wrote to his eldest daughter :

I am a good deal puzzled by English party politics, and in my own ignorance now should be the more ready to forgive (if I had not long since done so) the gross ignorance and hatred manifested from 1861 to 1864 by many parliamentary chiefs in regard to America.'

In estimating a man's character there is nothing more misleading than his own selected and edited letters, though as throwing a light on independent materials, or as illustrating facts and transactions which are known from other sources, they are invaluable. Apart from any study of Motley's character, his letters are of exceptional interest for the brilliant comments they contain on subjects which appeal to every educated reader, nor, we believe, is it possible for any one to rise from the perusal of them without that feeling of personal intimacy with, and of personal affection for, the writer which constitutes Vol. 168.-No. 336.

Ꮓ

one

one of the greatest charms of good memoirs and biographies, but as a means of arriving at a just and true estimate of character the chief value of this collection lies, perhaps, in the letters addressed to Motley. When we consider the variety of his correspondents and their individual high positions and intellectual celebrity, as well as the tone of confidence and ease which pervades their communications, it is impossible to escape the conviction, that they could only have been addressed to a man of remarkable qualities both of heart and head.

That as a public man he was not popular among certain classes in his own country is admitted by his biographer. Democracies, as Sir Henry Maine, amongst others, has proved, are slow to discern individual worth, and Motley did not illustrate the type of popular politician. He was too highminded, 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.'

The mere fact of his being a Massachusetts man had raised, in some quarters, strong opposition to his appointment to Vienna; the same cause had exercised a bitter influence in the McCracken accusations. His position in European societies had caused the stigma of aristocracy to be attached to him, a stigma which extreme Republicans are slow to forgive.

see

It was a strange irony of fate that the man, in whom the love of democratic institutions amounted to a passion, the man in whose eyes a monarch was, if not necessarily a monster like Philip II., yet unworthy of confidence; who can scarce anything to praise in the efforts of England under Elizabeth and James I. in that cause of European freedom, the credit of supporting which he would assign almost entirely to democratic Holland, that this man should have been assailed as an aristocrat; but so it was: the experience must have been a bitter one, but when the first pang of anger and mortification had passed away, it seems to have been succeeded by a feeling of manly humility and resignation.

'Do not believe me inclined to complain, or to pass what remains of life in feeble lamentations. When I think of all the blessings I have had, and of the measure of this world's goods infinitely beyond my deservings that have been heaped upon me, I should despise myself if I should not find strength enough to bear the sorrows which the Omnipotent has now chosen to send.'

Motley was, in short, one of those few beings, to whom we are tempted to apply that often misused phrase—a thorough gentleman.

We

We will close with some very striking words, written to Dean Stanley on the publication of the third volume of the "History of the Jews':

'If you had written the volumes expressly for my own behalf, it could not have been better adapted for the purpose. For it deals with subjects which exceedingly occupy my mind, and abounds with suggestions, explanations, and sympathetic aid towards the solution of problems and mysteries which press more and more upon the thoughts of those whose life's evening is closing in dark shadows and sorrows. You and I have both been struck: almost simultaneously by that irremediable blow which drives the soul forth into the vast and unknown void, and causes it to rebel at times at the bars which must restrain it so long as those mortal conditions last. I have been reading the book very slowly, for my mind wanders after attempting for a time to grasp great subjects, and I am obliged to take rest. How glad I am that your mind and body are both so vigorous and fresh, notwithstanding the great calamity which God has sent to you, and that you are not only able to find some relief in work, but furnish relief to others. How acutely you must have felt, in the painful but sacred circumstances attending your work, that laborare

est orare.

"The delicate and masterly manner in which you have traced out the connection between the ideas of the one invisible God revealing Himself at many intervals of space and time, and through differing races, to the highest of what we call human intellects; and the idea of a future life under unknown and unimaginable conditions, is to me most striking. Intense love seems to me to annihilate death, and love is the foundation of the Christian revelation.'

ART. III.-1. Goethe's Letters to Zelter, with Extracts from those of Zelter to Goethe. Selected, translated, and annotated by A. D. Coleridge, M.A., late Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. London, 1887.

2. Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret. Translated from the German by John Oxenford. New Edition. London, 1874.

3. Life of Goethe. By Heinrich Düntzer. Translated by Thomas W. Lyster, Assistant Librarian, National Library of Ireland. 2 vols. London, 1883.

4. Charlotte von Stein, Goethe's Freundin, &c. Von Heinrich Düntzer. Stuttgart, 1874.

5. Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe in den Jahren 1794 bis 1805. 2 vols. Stuttgart, 1870.

THE

We

HE times are changed since Carlyle and Lewes almost made us believe, that there never had been and never would be such a hero, poet, and philosopher as Goethe. Goethe societies have sprung up and flourished, it is true, since then; but Goethe-worship has been a little overdone, and the present age treats him somewhat coldly. We get our philosophy, as well as our religion and politics, from the four corners of the world, and do not take the trouble to be even eclectic. dislike anything that savours of a system; and Goethe, who harmonized his life with Nature, and preached and practised a modern Stoicism, is thought pedantic and cold by a generation of impressionists and realists. But this generation may learn a lesson of patience, if nothing else, from Goethe; and we are glad to be recalled to the contemplation of serene old age as it is shown in the volume of correspondence with Zelter, which Mr. A. D. Coleridge has translated from the German.

The original work is in seven volumes, and contains more than an impatient age has time to read. In its leisurely attention to trifles, its luxurious independence of persons and things, its combination of poetry, theatre, literature, philosophy, science sound and unsound, music and court gossip, it presents us with an autobiography of Goethe in the last thirty years of his life, the unaffected picture of his closing days.

Zelter, to whom these letters are addressed, is better known to the musical than to the literary world, as the friend and teacher of Felix Mendelssohn. He was also a conspicuous figure among the musicians of his time: and his best claim to remembrance is that he was among the first who made the works of John Sebastian Bach the property of the world, instead of remaining, as they had been for a century, the hidden treasure

of