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JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.

A MEMOIR

By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Volume I.

NOTE.

The Memoir here given to the public is based on a biographical sketch
prepared by the writer at the request of the Massachusetts Historical
Society for its Proceedings. The questions involving controversies into
which the Society could not feel called to enter are treated at
considerable length in the following pages. Many details are also given
which would have carried the paper written for the Society beyond the
customary limits of such tributes to the memory of its deceased members.
It is still but an outline which may serve a present need and perhaps be
of some assistance to a future biographer.

I.

1814-1827. To AEt. 13.

BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS.

John Motley, the great-grandfather of the subject of this Memoir, came in
the earlier part of the last century from Belfast in Ireland to Falmouth,
now Portland, in the District, now the State of Maine. He was twice
married, and had ten children, four of the first marriage and six of the
last. Thomas, the youngest son by his first wife, married Emma, a
daughter of John Wait, the first Sheriff of Cumberland County under the
government of the United States. Two of their seven sons, Thomas and
Edward, removed from Portland to Boston in 1802 and established
themselves as partners in commercial business, continuing united and
prosperous for nearly half a century before the firm was dissolved.

The earlier records of New England have preserved the memory of an
incident which deserves mention as showing how the historian's life was
saved by a quickwitted handmaid, more than a hundred years before he was
born. On the 29th of August, 1708, the French and Indians from Canada
made an attack upon the town of Haverhill, in Massachusetts. Thirty or
forty persons were slaughtered, and many others were carried captive into
Canada.

The minister of the town, Rev. Benjamin Rolfe, was killed by a bullet
through the door of his house. Two of his daughters, Mary, aged
thirteen, and Elizabeth, aged nine, were sleeping in a room with the
maid-servant, Hagar. When Hagar heard the whoop of the savages she
seized the children, ran with them into the cellar, and, after concealing
them under two large washtubs, hid herself. The Indians ransacked the
cellar, but missed the prey. Elizabeth, the younger of the two girls,
grew up and married the Rev. Samuel Checkley, first minister of the "New
South" Church, Boston. Her son, Rev. Samuel Checkley, Junior, was
minister of the Second Church, and his successor, Rev. John Lothrop, or
Lathrop, as it was more commonly spelled, married his daughter. Dr.
Lothrop was great-grandson of Rev. John Lothrop, of Scituate, who had
been imprisoned in England for nonconformity. The Checkleys were from
Preston Capes, in Northamptonshire. The name is probably identical with
that of the Chicheles or Chichleys, a well-known Northamptonshire family.

Thomas Motley married Anna, daughter of the Rev. John Lothrop,
granddaughter of the Rev. Samuel Checkley, Junior, the two ministers
mentioned above, both honored in their day and generation. Eight
children were born of this marriage, of whom four are still living.

JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY, the second of these children, was born in
Dorchester, now a part of Boston, Massachusetts, on the 15th of April,
1814. A member of his family gives a most pleasing and interesting
picture, from his own recollections and from what his mother told him,
of the childhood which was to develop into such rich maturity. The boy
was rather delicate in organization, and not much given to outdoor
amusements, except skating and swimming, of which last exercise he was
very fond in his young days, and in which he excelled. He was a great
reader, never idle, but always had a book in his hand,--a volume of
poetry or one of the novels of Scott or Cooper. His fondness for plays
and declamation is illustrated by the story told by a younger brother,
who remembers being wrapped up in a shawl and kept quiet by sweetmeats,
while he figured as the dead Caesar, and his brother, the future
historian, delivered the speech of Antony over his prostrate body. He
was of a most sensitive nature, easily excited, but not tenacious of any
irritated feelings, with a quick sense of honor, and the most entirely
truthful child, his mother used to say, that she had ever seen. Such are
some of the recollections of those who knew him in his earliest years and
in the most intimate relations.

His father's family was at this time living in the house No. 7 Walnut
Street, looking down Chestnut Street over the water to the western hills.
Near by, at the corner of Beacon Street, was the residence of the family
of the first mayor of Boston, and at a little distance from the opposite
corner was the house of one of the fathers of New England manufacturing
enterprise, a man of superior intellect, who built up a great name and
fortune in our city. The children from these three homes naturally
became playmates. Mr. Motley's house was a very hospitable one, and
Lothrop and two of his young companions were allowed to carry out their
schemes of amusement in the garden and the garret. If one with a
prescient glance could have looked into that garret on some Saturday
afternoon while our century was not far advanced in its second score of
years, he might have found three boys in cloaks and doublets and plumed
hats, heroes and bandits, enacting more or less impromptu melodramas.
In one of the boys he would have seen the embryo dramatist of a nation's
life history, John Lothrop Motley; in the second, a famous talker and wit
who has spilled more good things on the wasteful air in conversation than
would carry a "diner-out" through half a dozen London seasons, and waked
up somewhat after the usual flowering-time of authorship to find himself
a very agreeable and cordially welcomed writer,--Thomas Gold Appleton.
In the third he would have recognized a champion of liberty known
wherever that word is spoken, an orator whom to hear is to revive all the
traditions of the grace, the address, the commanding sway of the silver-
tongued eloquence of the most renowned speakers,--Wendell Phillips.

Both of young Motley's playmates have furnished me with recollections of
him and of those around him at this period of his life, and I cannot do
better than borrow freely from their communications. His father was a
man of decided character, social, vivacious, witty, a lover of books, and
himself not unknown as a writer, being the author of one or more of the
well remembered "Jack Downing" letters. He was fond of having the boys
read to him from such authors as Channing and Irving, and criticised
their way of reading with discriminating judgment and taste. Mrs. Motley
was a woman who could not be looked upon without admiration. I remember
well the sweet dignity of her aspect, her "regal beauty," as Mr. Phillips
truly styles it, and the charm of her serene and noble presence, which
made her the type of a perfect motherhood. Her character corresponded to
the promise of her gracious aspect. She was one of the fondest of
mothers, but not thoughtlessly indulgent to the boy from whom she hoped
and expected more than she thought it wise to let him know. The story
used to be current that in their younger days this father and mother were
the handsomest pair the town of Boston could show. This son of theirs
was "rather tall," says Mr. Phillips, "lithe, very graceful in movement
and gesture, and there was something marked and admirable in the set of
his head on his shoulders,"--a peculiar elegance which was most
noticeable in those later days when I knew him. Lady Byron long
afterwards spoke of him as more like her husband in appearance than any
other person she had met; but Mr. Phillips, who remembers the first bloom
of his boyhood and youth, thinks he was handsomer than any portrait of
Byron represents the poet. "He could not have been eleven years old,"
says the same correspondent, "when he began writing a novel. It opened,
I remember, not with one solitary horseman, but with two, riding up to an
inn in the valley of the Housatonic. Neither of us had ever seen the
Housatonic, but it sounded grand and romantic. Two chapters were
finished."

There is not much remembered of the single summer he passed at Mr.
Green's school at Jamaica Plain. From that school he went to Round
Hill, Northampton, then under the care of Mr. Cogswell and Mr. Bancroft.
The historian of the United States could hardly have dreamed that the
handsome boy of ten years was to take his place at the side of his
teacher in the first rank of writers in his own department. Motley came
to Round Hill, as one of his schoolmates tells me, with a great
reputation, especially as a declaimer. He had a remarkable facility for
acquiring languages, excelled as a reader and as a writer, and was the
object of general admiration for his many gifts. There is some reason to
think that the flattery he received was for a time a hindrance to his
progress and the development of his character. He obtained praise too
easily, and learned to trust too much to his genius. He had everything
to spoil him,--beauty, precocious intelligence, and a personal charm
which might have made him a universal favorite. Yet he does not seem to
have been generally popular at this period of his life. He was wilful,
impetuous, sometimes supercilious, always fastidious. He would study as
he liked, and not by rule. His school and college mates believed in his
great possibilities through all his forming period, but it may be doubted
if those who counted most confidently on his future could have supposed
that he would develop the heroic power of concentration, the long-
breathed tenacity of purpose, which in after years gave effect to his
brilliant mental endowments. "I did wonder," says Mr. Wendell Phillips,
"at the diligence and painstaking, the drudgery shown in his historical
works. In early life he had no industry, not needing it. All he cared
for in a book he caught quickly,--the spirit of it, and all his mind
needed or would use. This quickness of apprehension was marvellous.
"I do not find from the recollections of his schoolmates at Northampton
that he was reproached for any grave offences, though he may have
wandered beyond the prescribed boundaries now and then, and studied
according to his inclinations rather than by rule. While at that school
he made one acquisition much less common then than now,--a knowledge of
the German language and some degree of acquaintance with its literature,
under the guidance of one of the few thorough German scholars this
country then possessed, Mr. George Bancroft.

II.

1827-1831. AEt. 13-17.

COLLEGE LIFE.

Such then was the boy who at the immature, we might almost say the
tender, age of thirteen entered Harvard College. Though two years after
me in college standing, I remember the boyish reputation which he brought
with him, especially that of a wonderful linguist, and the impression
which his striking personal beauty produced upon us as he took his seat
in the college chapel. But it was not until long after this period that
I became intimately acquainted with him, and I must again have recourse
to the classmates and friends who have favored me with their
reminiscences of this period of his life. Mr. Phillips says:

"During our first year in college, though the youngest in the class,
he stood third, I think, or second in college rank, and ours was an
especially able class. Yet to maintain this rank he neither cared
nor needed to make any effort. Too young to feel any
responsibilities, and not yet awake to any ambition, he became so
negligent that he was 'rusticated' [that is, sent away from college
for a time]. He came back sobered, and worked rather more, but with
no effort for college rank thenceforward."

I must finish the portrait of the collegian with all its lights and
shadows by the help of the same friends from whom I have borrowed the
preceding outlines.

He did not care to make acquaintances, was haughty in manner and cynical
in mood, at least as he appeared to those in whom he felt no special
interest. It is no wonder, therefore, that he was not a popular
favorite, although recognized as having very brilliant qualities. During
all this period his mind was doubtless fermenting with projects which
kept him in a fevered and irritable condition. "He had a small writing-
table," Mr. Phillips says, "with a shallow drawer; I have often seen it
half full of sketches, unfinished poems, soliloquies, a scene or two of a
play, prose portraits of some pet character, etc. These he would read to
me, though he never volunteered to do so, and every now and then he burnt
the whole and began to fill the drawer again."

My friend, Mr. John Osborne Sargent, who was a year before him in
college, says, in a very interesting letter with which he has favored me:

"My first acquaintance with him [Motley] was at Cambridge, when he
came from Mr. Cogswell's school at Round Hill. He then had a good
deal of the shyness that was just pronounced enough to make him
interesting, and which did not entirely wear off till he left
college. . . I soon became acquainted with him, and we used to take
long walks together, sometimes taxing each other's memory for poems
or passages from poems that had struck our fancy. Shelley was then
a great favorite of his, and I remember that Praed's verses then
appearing in the 'New Monthly' he thought very clever and brilliant,
and was fond of repeating them. You have forgotten, or perhaps
never knew, that Motley's first appearance in print was in the
'Collegian.' He brought me one day, in a very modest mood, a
translation from Goethe, which I was most happy to oblige him by
inserting. It was very prettily done, and will now be a curiosity.
. . . How it happened that Motley wrote only one piece I do not
remember. I had the pleasure about that time of initiating him as a
member of the Knights of the Square Table,--always my favorite
college club, for the reason, perhaps, that I was a sometime Grand
Master. He was always a genial and jovial companion at our supper-
parties at Fresh Pond and Gallagher's."

We who live in the days of photographs know how many faces belong to
every individual. We know too under what different aspects the same
character appears to those who study it from different points of view and
with different prepossessions. I do not hesitate, therefore, to place
side by side the impressions of two of his classmates as to one of his
personal traits as they observed him at this period of his youth.

"He was a manly boy, with no love for or leaning to girls' company;
no care for dress; not a trace of personal vanity. . . . He was,
or at least seemed, wholly unconscious of his rare beauty and of the
fascination of his manner; not a trace of pretence, the simplest and
most natural creature in the world."

Look on that picture and on this:--

"He seemed to have a passion for dress. But as in everything else,
so in this, his fancy was a fitful one. At one time he would excite
our admiration by the splendor of his outfit, and perhaps the next
week he would seem to take equal pleasure in his slovenly or
careless appearance."

It is not very difficult to reconcile these two portraitures. I
recollect it was said by a witty lady of a handsome clergyman well
remembered among us, that he had dressy eyes. Motley so well became
everything he wore, that if he had sprung from his bed and slipped his
clothes on at an alarm of fire, his costume would have looked like a
prince's undress. His natural presentment, like that of Count D'Orsay,
was of the kind which suggests the intentional effects of an elaborate
toilet, no matter how little thought or care may have been given to make
it effective. I think the "passion for dress" was really only a
seeming, and that he often excited admiration when he had not taken half
the pains to adorn himself that many a youth less favored by nature has
wasted upon his unblest exterior only to be laughed at.

I gather some other interesting facts from a letter which I have received
from his early playmate and school and college classmate, Mr. T. G.
Appleton.

"In his Sophomore year he kept abreast of the prescribed studies,
but his heart was out of bounds, as it often had been at Round Hill
when chasing squirrels or rabbits through forbidden forests.
Already his historical interest was shaping his life. A tutor
coming-by chance, let us hope--to his room remonstrated with him
upon the heaps of novels upon his table.

"'Yes,' said Motley, 'I am reading historically, and have come to the
novels of the nineteenth century. Taken in the lump, they are very hard
reading.'"

All Old Cambridge people know the Brattle House, with its gambrel roof,
its tall trees, its perennial spring, its legendary fame of good fare and
hospitable board in the days of the kindly old bon vivant, Major Brattle.
In this house the two young students, Appleton and Motley, lived during a
part of their college course.

"Motley's room was on the ground floor, the room to the left of the
entrance. He led a very pleasant life there, tempering his college
duties with the literature he loved, and receiving his friends
amidst elegant surroundings, which added to the charm of his
society. Occasionally we amused ourselves by writing for the
magazines and papers of the day. Mr. Willis had just started a slim
monthly, written chiefly by himself, but with the true magazine
flavor. We wrote for that, and sometimes verses in the corner of a
paper called 'The Anti-Masonic Mirror,' and in which corner was a
woodcut of Apollo, and inviting to destruction ambitious youths by
the legend underneath,--

'Much yet remains unsung.'

These pieces were usually dictated to each other, the poet recumbent
upon the bed and a classmate ready to carry off the manuscript for
the paper of the following day. 'Blackwood's' was then in its
glory, its pages redolent of 'mountain dew' in every sense; the
humor of the Shepherd, the elegantly brutal onslaughts upon Whigs
and Cockney poets by Christopher North, intoxicated us youths.

"It was young writing, and made for the young. The opinions were
charmingly wrong, and its enthusiasm was half Glenlivet. But this
delighted the boys. There were no reprints then, and to pass the
paper-cutter up the fresh inviting pages was like swinging over the
heather arm in arm with Christopher himself. It is a little
singular that though we had a college magazine of our own, Motley
rarely if ever wrote for it. I remember a translation from Goethe,
'The Ghost-Seer,' which he may have written for it, and a poem upon
the White Mountains. Motley spoke at one of the college exhibitions
an essay on Goethe so excellent that Mr. Joseph Cogswell sent it to
Madam Goethe, who, after reading it, said, 'I wish to see the first
book that young man will write.'"

Although Motley did not aim at or attain a high college rank, the rules
of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, which confine the number of members to the
first sixteen of each class, were stretched so as to include him,--a
tribute to his recognized ability, and an evidence that a distinguished
future was anticipated for him.

III.

1832-1833. AEt. 18-19.

STUDY AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE.

Of the two years divided between the Universities of Berlin and Gottingen
I have little to record. That he studied hard I cannot doubt; that he
found himself in pleasant social relations with some of his fellow-
students seems probable from the portraits he has drawn in his first
story, "Morton's Hope," and is rendered certain so far as one of his
companions is concerned. Among the records of the past to which he
referred during his last visit to this country was a letter which he took
from a collection of papers and handed me to read one day when I was
visiting him. The letter was written in a very lively and exceedingly
familiar vein. It implied such intimacy, and called up in such a lively
way the gay times Motley and himself had had together in their youthful
days, that I was puzzled to guess who could have addressed him from
Germany in that easy and off-hand fashion. I knew most of his old
friends who would be likely to call him by his baptismal name in its most
colloquial form, and exhausted my stock of guesses unsuccessfully before
looking at the signature. I confess that I was surprised, after laughing
at the hearty and almost boyish tone of the letter, to read at the bottom
of the page the signature of Bismarck. I will not say that I suspect
Motley of having drawn the portrait of his friend in one of the
characters of "Morton's Hope," but it is not hard to point out traits
in one of them which we can believe may have belonged to the great
Chancellor at an earlier period of life than that at which the world
contemplates his overshadowing proportions.

Hoping to learn something of Motley during the two years while we had
lost sight of him, I addressed a letter to His Highness Prince Bismarck,
to which I received the following reply:--

FOREIGN OFFICE, BERLIN, March 11, 1878.

SIR,--I am directed by Prince Bismarck to acknowledge the receipt of
your letter of the 1st of January, relating to the biography of the
late Mr. Motley. His Highness deeply regrets that the state of his
health and pressure of business do not allow him to contribute
personally, and as largely as he would be delighted to do, to your
depicting of a friend whose memory will be ever dear to him. Since
I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Mr. Motley at
Varzin, I have been intrusted with communicating to you a few
details I have gathered from the mouth of the Prince. I enclose
them as they are jotted down, without any attempt of digestion.

I have the honor to be
Your obedient servant,
LOTHAIR BUCHER.

"Prince Bismarck said:--

"'I met Motley at Gottingen in 1832, I am not sure if at the
beginning of Easter Term or Michaelmas Term. He kept company with
German students, though more addicted to study than we members of
the fighting clubs (: corps:). Although not having mastered yet the
German language, he exercised a marked attraction by a conversation
sparkling with wit, humor, and originality. In autumn of 1833,
having both of us migrated from Gottingen to Berlin for the
prosecution of our studies, we became fellow-lodgers in the house
No. 161 Friedrich Strasse. There we lived in the closest intimacy,
sharing meals and outdoor exercise. Motley by that time had arrived
at talking German fluently; he occupied himself not only in
translating Goethe's poem "Faust," but tried his hand even in
composing German verses. Enthusiastic admirer of Shakespeare,
Byron, Goethe, he used to spice his conversation abundantly with
quotations from these his favorite authors. A pertinacious arguer,
so much so that sometimes he watched my awakening in order to
continue a discussion on some topic of science, poetry, or practical
life, cut short by the chime of the small hours, he never lost his
mild and amiable temper. Our faithful companion was Count Alexander
Keyserling, a native of Courland, who has since achieved distinction
as a botanist.

"'Motley having entered the diplomatic service of his country, we
had frequently the opportunity of renewing our friendly intercourse;
at Frankfort he used to stay with me, the welcome guest of my wife;
we also met at Vienna, and, later, here. The last time I saw him
was in 1872 at Varzin, at the celebration of my "silver wedding,"
namely, the twenty-fifth anniversary.

"'The most striking feature of his handsome and delicate appearance
was uncommonly large and beautiful eyes. He never entered a
drawing-room without exciting the curiosity and sympathy of the
ladies.'"

It is but a glimpse of their young life which the great statesman gives
us, but a bright and pleasing one. Here were three students, one of whom
was to range in the flowery fields of the loveliest of the sciences,
another to make the dead past live over again in his burning pages, and a
third to extend an empire as the botanist spread out a plant and the
historian laid open a manuscript.

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