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painter filled his great canvases.
They need retouching, perhaps, but the younger historians are incompetent for the task.
Prescott died in 1859, in the same year as Irving, and he already seems quite as remote from the present hour.
His young friend Motley, of Dutch Republic fame, was another Boston Brahmin, born in the year of Prescott's graduation from college.
IHe attended George Bancroft's school, went to Harvard in due course, where he knew Holmes, Sumner, and Wendell Phillips, and at Gottingen became a warm friend of a dog-lover and duelist named Bismarck.
Young Motley wrote a couple of unsuccessful novels, dabbled in diplomacy, politics, and review-writing, and finally, encouraged by Prescott, settled down upon Dutch history, went to Europe to work up his material in 1851, and, after five years, scored an immense triumph with his Rise of the Dutch Republic.
He was a brilliant partisan, hating Spaniards and Calvinists, and wrote all the better for this bias.
He was an admirable sketcher of historical portraits, and had Macaulay's skill in composing special chapters devoted to the tendencies and qualities of an epoch or to the characteristics of
New Haven. Yale University. Press. 1921.
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