conversions, so called, have been marked with but little conviction and struggle and agony of mind, compared with those taking place formerly, and under an older theology.

The theory of conversion by self-determination and resolution, and which is said to be pressed that the sinner may feel his responsibility, leaves the thing very much in his own hands. He is taught that he will become a Christian at his own pleasure, and when his self-determining will takes that turn. He is not, then, in a very hard case. He is not so near "dead" in sin as to feel quite helpless. The apostasy has not wrought a terrible work in him. Under such a theory, advocated and urged that the sinner may feel his responsibility, he is quite inclined to take the responsibility. Of course the agonies of conviction, and the breaking up of the soul, as in despair, do not come on that man, and when he is said to turn to God, he comes "easily and gracefully into the kingdom."

The theory of regeneration by resolution, that we have discarded, also shows us why we have so many inefficient and worldly professors of religion in the Church. In many of these cases they are probably converts by a self-determination. A solemn, prayerful purpose started them, as they thought, in the Christian way. While feeling was ardent around them, they run well, like Paul's Galatian converts, but they run only under human forces. Now their resolution does not bear them up and carry them on. The Church is cumbered by them. Yet have they practised what they were taught, that the resolution and the dedication are regeneration. They have run as long and gone as far as this theory allows. Their apparent piety is periodic, and shows itself only under special means and measures. We stand in doubt of them. We fear that they were born" of the will of the flesh," and feel that they must be born" of God."

ARTICLE II.

MOTLEY'S DUTCH REPUBLIC AND UNITED
NETHERLANDS.

The Rise of the Dutch Republic. A History. By JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY. 3 vols. 8vo. 1855. New York: Harper

& Brothers.

History of the United Netherlands, from the Death of William the Silent to the Synod of Dort, with a full View of the English-Dutch Struggle against Spain, and of the Origin and Destruction of the Spanish Armada. By JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY, D. C. L. 2 vols. 8vo. 1861. New York: Harper & Brothers.

THE brilliant reputation achieved by Mr. Motley, almost immediately on the appearance of his former volumes, is in no danger of diminution from the present instalment of his new work. It might have been anticipated that the man who could tell the story of the great Netherland struggle in any apprehensible form, would find plenty of hearers. The subject itself is one, as we shall have occasion to remark more at length by and by, in which every supporter of a constitutional government, and especially every friend of religious liberty, feels an almost direct personal interest. Yet our interest in the subject will scarcely exceed our gratitude to the author when we reflect on the hardly accessible sources from which his materials have. been gathered, and the skill with which they have been digested into not only a consistent history, but an entertaining and exciting narrative. We occasionally hear something about a "learned leisure," and are apt to get the impression from certain sources, that a historian needs only to be a man of tolerable information and have nothing else to do, whereupon the muse Clio will use him as a first-class "writing medium," and through him communicate her revelations of the past to the generations of the present and the future. If this were so, Mr. Motley would have strangely mistaken his calling. One

is almost appalled at the toilsome drudgery to which he must have devoted himself in preparation for his task. It was something to carefully study "all the leading contemporary chronicles and pamphlets of Holland, Flanders, Spain, France, Germany, and England;" yet the testimony furnished here, important as some of it is, is in great part false and all of it imperfect. The actors in the scenes, or rather behind the scenes, here described, were quite as anxious as otherwise that the contemporary public should understand them to say what for the most part they did not mean.

The most valuable of the materials from which the contents of these volumes have been arranged, were unpublished ones. Through many wearisome days must the student have searched in sundry state-paper offices, and in manuscript departments of various literary museums, deciphering the most private letters, reports, and instructions, not only in English, French, and German, but also in unscholarly Dutch, in barbarous mediaval Latin, and in Spanish, which was certainly not superior to that of Cervantes. The vast piles of manuscripts to be examined, the many pages of words to a single valuable thought, the sickening details of lying diplomacy, might have discouraged any but the most enthusiastic seeker after historic fact. Yet without the evidence recorded in the archives of Simancas, in the handwriting of Philip and his private secretaries, and in the secret papers filed away in various depositaries at London, Paris, The Hague, and elsewhere, the true history of those times could not have been fairly set forth.

"To him who has patience and industry many mysteries are thus revealed which no political sagacity or critical acumen could have divined. He leans over the shoulder of Philip the Second at his writing-table, as the king spells patiently out, with cipher-key in hand, the most concealed hieroglyphics of Parma or Guise or Mendoza. He reads the secret thoughts of Fabius,* as that cunctative Roman scrawls his marginal apostilles on each despatch; he pries into all the stratagems of Camillus, Hortensius, Mucius, Julius, Tullius, and the rest of those ancient heroes who lent their names to the diplomatic masqueraders of the 16th century; he enters the cabinet of the deeplypondering Burghley, and takes from the most private drawer the

♦ The name usually assigned to Philip in the secret correspondence.

memoranda which record that minister's unutterable doubtings; he pulls from the dressing-gown folds of the stealthy, softly-gliding Walsingham the last secret which he has picked from the Emperor's pigeon-holes, or the Pope's pocket, and which not Hatton, nor Buckhurst, nor Leicester, nor the Lord Treasurer, is to see; nobody but Elizabeth herself; he sits invisible at the most secret councils of the Nassaus and Barneveldt and Buys, or pores with Farnese over coming victories and schemes of universal conquest; he reads the latest bit of scandal, the minutest characteristic of king or minister, chronicled by the gossiping Venetians for the edification of the Forty; and after all this prying and eaves-dropping, having seen the cross-purposes, the bribings, the windings, the fencings in the dark, he is not surprised, if those who were systematically deceived did not always arrive at correct conclusions."- U. N. Vol. I. pp. 54, 55.

The dissimulation to which all the diplomatists of the times devoted themselves, the systematic deception and falsehood everywhere cultivated, from the highest majesty to the lowest court agent, quite throws into the shade the puny, puerile, and transparent mendacity of our modern politics; the former had the dignity, at least, of a comprehensive science. To be sure, these persons were wise enough always to discredit one another's most solemn asseverations; but if they knew what to doubt they did not always know what to believe. We can conceive of only one more puzzling element possible to their correspondence. A single plain truth would have put them more to their wit's end than whole reams of the most ingenious prevarication. This perplexity, however, they never experienced.

Yet we find no evidence on the pages of these volumes of any such weariness as we might suppose would come of this toilsome study. On the contrary there is an elasticity, a vigor, and a glow of enthusiasm, betokening that the author is heartily in love with his work, and that he has an earnest interest in the cause whose varied fortunes he describes. Mr. Motley's style is an imitation of no master or predecessor: indeed we might almost say it is unlike itself; so versatile and unequal is it. He is perhaps inferior to Bancroft in philosophic acuteness and in the majestic movement of his narrative; less uniformly elegant than Prescott; less genial and immediately attractive than Irving; yet in his qualities as a whole not much inferior to either of them. His wine does not always sparkle and exhilarate like

that of Macaulay, but it is more purely from the grape, more wholesome and invigorating. Macaulay gives us splendid pictures in the highest style of art; Motley makes us look at the men and things themselves in their natural character. The former works up his material in such manner as to put his own stamp on it, always transmuting it into his own thought. The latter invents no speeches or conversations for the parties in his histories, nor does he undertake to modernize or popularize their communications; they appear in the ipsissima verba of authentic documents. He is wonderfully natural and easy-sometimes, to be sure, there is a looseness and inelegance of statement which is not so attractive; then again he is sententious and epigrammatic; now plain, clear, and practical, and now with a grand, inspiring eloquence which quite captivates the reader. His indignation is occasionally intense — more so than is needful perhaps yet we hardly wonder at it in one who was to describe the atrocities of some of Philip's agents, the sanguinary excesses of the Spaniards, the black treachery by which the negotiations for peace were characterized, and the parsimony, selfishness, and infatuation which mingled themselves with nobler elements in the character of Elizabeth. There is withal a sprightliness, a ready wit and quiet humor, more luminous than ornamental, indigenous to the style, and which always bring us into familiar contact with the events described.

In the volumes comprising the Rise of the Dutch Republic,' Mr. Motley has given us the course of events in complete detail from the accession of Philip the Second to the assassination of William the Silent. It will be requisite to recapitulate briefly some of these events. It is well known that the Netherlands were a part of the dominions under the magnificent sway of Charles the Fifth, and as such fell to the possession of Philip the Second on the abdication of his father. The latter proceeded to settle the government on an absolute basis. But the struggle of the free spirit, native to the people from the days of Julius Cæsar, with the despotic assumptions of various rulers, had not yet subsided, nor did it manifest much disposition to yield to the demands of Philip. The doctrines of the Reformation, too, had just at this time been eagerly accepted by multi